SITI Company’s production of Radio Macbeth exploits the centuries of superstition and lore surrounding “The Scottish Play.” Actors in rehearsal will go to great lengths to avoid pronouncing the name of the play or the protagonist inside the theatre due to the belief that they will bring misfortune and disaster upon themselves, the theatre or the production. This results in elaborate euphemisms such as referring to the couple as Mr. and Mrs. M. or the king himself as Mackers or MacBee.
The origin of this curse has many supposed points of origin. In the play’s original production, legend has it, the trick daggers were switched for real ones resulting in an on-stage death of an actor. Talk about suffering for your art! Some say that Shakespeare “borrowed” the spells of the Weird Sisters from a coven of “real” witches who, lacking any protection under copyright law, opted to haunt subsequent productions, causing actors to fall to their deaths and stagehands to drop dead in the wings. A less romantic view would point out that classical theatre with their ad-hoc back stage areas were prime areas for disaster, or that since Macbeth was such a popular play that theatres would often stage it as a last-ditch effort to stave off financial trouble and hence the association between the play and the closing of theatres.
The remedies employed by actors to fend off misfortune are legion and include leaving the theatre, spinning around three times, spitting or reciting a virtuous line of the play itself. No doubt the legend grew as each generation of veteran actors regaled the new ones with weird occurrences they had witnessed during production with their own eyes.
Determining the true origin of the legend, however, is perhaps less important than examining the haunting effect that it has and continues to have upon theatre artists and audiences alike. The enduring themes of the dangers of overarching ambition, the torture of a guilty conscience and the onslaught of madness continue to resonate with contemporary audiences while the lean, pared down production that SITI delivers highlights one of Shakespeare’s particular gifts; the infusion of the guts and gore, the gritty bodily aspects of life with high poetry.
Radio Macbeth leans heavily on the play’s most famous speeches, allowing a return to the ritualistic incantatory aspect of theatre making it a species of meditation for the Shakespeare fan. You can almost feel the spectator in the seat next to you mouthing the words silently during the dagger speech. The open-ended approach that the production takes allows you to consider all other productions you might have seen of the play, or even perhaps your own thoughts when you previously read or studied it. The bare stage and the lean approach place the focus on the skill of the actor and the beauty of the text. Spectators are free to contemplate all the emanations and meanings of the complex metaphors and figurative language in a placid pool, free of spectacle, impressive costumes, and special effects.
In his book, The Haunted Stage, Marvin Carlson points out the extent to which the spectator’s enjoyment of classical theatre depends upon what he calls ghosting. In other words, any production of a play is haunted, to a certain extent by all previous productions of the play due to the memories (and even the body memories) of both stage performers and audiences. The dagger we see before us is even a ghost of all the other daggers which have hung before the eyes of all other amazed performers and audiences of the past. This creates a plenitude of stage meaning in each moment that is not reducible to any one interpretation. This haunting of the live performance by the collective memories of actors and audiences produces the “frisson” or shiver that we feel in live performance and may also explains why we, in theatre are in turn so obsessed with ghosts.
SITI Company has capitalized on the phenomena of “ghosting” in live performance. The focus is shifted from the obvious dramatic tension of the murder plot and returned to poetic contemplation of the words themselves. The production intentionally violates the taboo, and the performers themselves seem to intentionally taunt the ghosts of past performances with each utterance of the king’s name. The play opens, as the liner notes tell us, in the “guts” of an abandoned rehearsal hall. This visceral, corporeal personification of the architectural space of performance is likely a nod to the company’s well documented use of the viewpoint method of actor training.
The setting and the sparse lean production are infused with the layers of meaning applied by the actors in response to their own quotidian experience in the rehearsal hall. The spooky terrain between the actor and the “character” he is playing is on display here. Each time we hear Macbeth, the tension in the room heightens. There are crashes in the dark. The use of the microphones allows the audience to focus on the performers’ formidable vocal skills and the earthy poetry of one of Shakespeare’s most beloved plays.
Dr. Natalie Meisner
Department of English,
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