William Shakespeare's Macbeth Problems and Challenges in Staging the Scottish Play

Abstract

Over the years, Macbeth has been widely admired, but on the stage it has not managed to achieve the “iconic” status of many productions of Hamlet and King Lear. Actually, no other play by Shakespeare has so extensively disappointed the audiences. Moving into the 20th century, Macbeth stage history is littered with failure. Despite the play’s bold outline, there are in fact, specific difficulties which any director must confront. The first of these is the role and staging of the supernatural elements of the play, specifically the Witches, the dagger, and Banquo’s ghost. It has proved to be very challenging to find a convincing way to stage the witches for modern audiences without falling into merely comic stereotypes. Another major problem seems to be the close concentration on two central figures, Macbeth and Lady Macbeth who need to be unusually well matched. This has proved to be very difficult to achieve. The play is also unusual in its portrait of two people going through a crisis together and in the lack of vivid secondary characters such as Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet or Hamlet’s Ophelia. The focus is so strongly on the two leading performers that the lives of the other cannot sustain the comparison. There has, however, been considerable interest in the witches who opens the play dramatically. Success in staging Macbeth has lately been the exception rather than the rule; but there have been successes. A rare case of fully satisfying performance is Trevor Nunn’s Macbeth. In 1976 he directed Ian McKellen and Judi Dench at The Other Place theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon giving to the audience one of the most successful productions of the play. In 1978, the performance was recorded for television and critics proclaimed it the best since the famous Laurence Olivier –Vivien Leigh production at Stratford Upon Avon in 1955. That landmark production survives only through the director’s promptbook, photographs, reviews and reconstructed staging of the story . The aim of this work is to see how the staging of Macbeth has changed in its history to date. The issues raised briefly in this introduction will recur: the features of the Elizabethan period and theatres, Macbeth in performance, the importance of adaptation and the audience reception of the play.