On May 2nd 2024 I watched a new production of Macbeth, filmed live and streamed into the Beacon, Eastbourne. It starred Ralph Fiennes as the eponymous anti-hero with Indira Varma as Lady Macbeth. Shakespeare’s original version was boldly adapted by Emily Burns and directed by Simon Godwin.
The porter scene was cut. I suppose it was felt that some of his jokes are too obscure for modern audiences. But the porter scene is the only comedy interlude in the whole play. They did achieve a few laughs, notably (A2S3) after Lennox has made a long speech about how there has been a storm with chimneys blown down and screams of death ... and Macbeth makes the laconic response: ‘Twas a rough night’. But the porter scene is important because it is the most dramatic moment of transition in the play (and the other key transition, when Duncan, speaking of a rebel, has just said “There’s no art To find the mind’s construction in the face: He was a gentleman on whom I built An absolute trust.” and Macbeth enters was also diluted since Macbeth was already on stage). So I mourned the missing porter.
Other changes made more sense. The witches were fragmented and inserted more often into the play, making them seem responsible for driving the action and for Lady Macbeth’s otherwise inexplicable descent into madness. The first act was significantly simplified, removing the confusion that so often results from the fact that there are actually two rebellions in different parts of Scotland.
Macbeth was played as a rather reluctant villain by making much of his hesitation and uncertainty before the assassination. Intriguingly, Fiennes spoke his lines in a metronomic monotone, as if the iambic verse was composed entirely of spondees; this gave his delivery a hypnotic quality and maximised the emotional impact without straying into melodrama.
Lady Macbeth was very much the dominant partner in their relationship. Varma played the “unsex me here” speech as if it was an incantation and she was summoning demons; throughout she was determined and resolute in her wickedness. This, perhaps controversially, focuses the guilt on her rather than her husband. But it is his breakdown which is chronicled in minute detail, so that by the end the audience is made to feel sorry for him. This interpretation of Lady M makes her descent into madness - the famous sleep-walking scene - even more sudden and hard to explain. She had seemed so certain. Varma played the part brilliantly both as the cold-hearted villain and as the madwoman and it seems to me to be a flaw in the play that the change from one to the other is so difficult to understand (this production had the witches chasing her at one point but this didn’t really seem enough).
But the most spell-binding moment of the play came when Ben Turner as Macduff is told that his wife and children have been murdered. Shakespeare never wrote bereavement better and I doubt anyone has ever acted these lines better. There were some achingly long drawn out pauses as Macduff struggled to comprehend the enormity of his tragedy. And Duncan, urging revenge, sounded just crass.
How to do the supernatural bits is a conundrum for directors facing modern audiences, many of whom, unlike in Shakespeare’s day, no longer believe in witches or ghosts. The dagger was invisible (“thank goodness”, I heard someone in my audience say) but Banquo’s ghost, a fluorescing white, sat in his place at the table. The most innovative change came when the witches get apparitions to prophesy to Macbeth (Birnam Wood and ‘no man born of woman’). In this production the witches magicked the murderers (who had hung around as Macbeth’s personal thugs) into mediums, complete with fits of twitching and shaking. This worked really well.
With clever touches such as this and a brilliant supporting cast, this production, despite the lack of the porter, was one of the best versions of Macbeth I’ve ever seen.
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