A Director's Approach

I have never been one to sit and ponder a playwright 's intentions. It has always seemed to me, especially in a profession so capable of over indugence and pretention, that there is always the danger that we might begin looking for things that are not there, and over developing to the point where the original directon of a script is lost. We almost lose sight of the fact that we are storytellers, and our job is to give a true account of the story we are undertaking.

Yet in order to tell that story we must look just that little bit harder in order to find out in which direction we should be going. And so it was with Macbeth. My starting point, as most people's would be, was an academic one having, studied the play as a student. But what I accepted fairly readily as a student I was now very dissatisfied with.Time, and an involvement with plays like The Crucible had given me a reasonable understanding of early perceptions of witchcraft, and I knew that James I, the newly crowned king at the time of this play's writing, had both a profound interest in, and revulsion of, the occult, and an almost obsessive conviction that he was the direct descendant of Banquo.

There was one other thing that lead me in the direction I was to pursue to its end, and that was the fact that I do not subscribe to the notion that Shakespeare wrote with a view to producng high art. He was a businessman first and foremost, achieving a high reputation and the nickname "the money man of Stratford" for his astute dealings and practices, so this notion that he was always intending to examine deap dark sectors of humanity fails to impress me. He wrote to appeal to the crowd on whose money he relied (no Arts Council or lottery Funding for him!) and so isn't it more likely that he would, for his first production as Kings Man, for a newly crowned king wth particuar obsessions, write a piece that would concur with that king's ideas viewpoints and convictions? Was he not more likely to seek to confirm his position at court than jeopardise it? IV.1 bears this out; what after all is the signficance of a line of kings stretching out, bearing orb and sceptre, the symbols of royalty for Scotland and England, or indeed the witches' prophecy to Banquo (I.3) that "Thou shall get kings, though thou be none", if not to pander to these caprices. And if he is intent on appealing to the crowd, isn't he more likely to try to produce his era's version of The Exorcist rather than baffle them with his philosphical observations on the nature of humanity?

There is something else to consider also. In almost every play Shakespeare creates resolutions, satisfactory conclusions where wrongs are righted, evil defeated, and all is put in its proper order. Macbeth is different. True the tyrant is killed and Duncan's heir ascends to the throne, but the witches go free for all their malignancy, and do not pay any price for their evil. There is every reason to believe that their thirst for discord will lead them to action again and is highly in keeping with the cyclic nature of the occult. There are some startling parallels drawn between Macbeth and Macduff, and hints (esp. IV.3) that they are in many ways cut from the same cloth.And we are given no explanaton of how Banquo's descendants come to the throne.

We today dismiss the occult and witchcraft as fanciful nonesense, but this era was convinced of its power and reality and thousands died as a consequence of their convictions for practicing witchcraft, so to dismiss the occult in Macbeth as a mere dramatic device, or the internal wranglings of a disturbed mind is to ignore a whole aspect of the culture and society for whom this play was intended. This is arrogant n the extreme.

In deducing the motive behind writing the play is reasonable therefore to accept that more than a play about ambition and greed Macbeth deals primarilly with witchcraft and the nature of evil. Once we have accepted this the very nature of the production, its look, its feel, the handling of the characters by the actors will change.