"Macbeth"-- Risk Taking and the Art of Sticking It to Others

Rating:	★★★★
Category:	Other

I saw a recent production of "Macbeth" at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. The play starred Peter Macon as the gallant and brave Scottish Thane who gets a bum steer from three witches in the smoky aftermath of the battle. Our Thane gets a couple of the witches' predictions fulfilled and he falls hook, line and sinker for the idea that he will be king. His friend, Banquo isn't so sure about these witches. He's the smart one.

Macbeth, as you might remember from school, then makes the mistake of going home to tell his wife. Lady Macbeth (Robin Goodwin Nordi) is as big a social climber as he is--maybe a little bigger.
Let's her what she has to say about getting ahead in Medieval Scotland


"Come, you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts! unsex me here,
And fill me from the crown to the toe, top-full
Of direst cruelty; make thick my blood,
Stop up the access and passage to remorse,
That no compunctious visitings of nature
Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between
The effect and it! Come to my woman's breasts,
And take my milk for gall, you murdering ministers,
Wherever in your sightless substances
You wait on nature's mischief!"

Talk about a desperate housewife! She does help him in his murderous affairs. And, as he loses his conscience, Lady Macbeth gets her own back. Of course, she also goes a mad, so in a way Macbeth and his wife sort of intersect in their character arcs. She kills herself, he gets morose, then he loses his head--literally.

Macbeth is a fun play to watch because it has a lot of action and sword play. The best scene in this play was when the actor playing MacDuff discovers that his wife and children have been killed by the tyrant Macbeth. The actor did it so well, playing the grieving family man now with no family, that it made one feel it couldn't have been done better.

Maybe not one of Shakespeare's greatest tragedies--it was not popular in its time with playgoers apparently--but I'm sure the sorcery-obsessed James got a kick out of it.

Although the professional reviews were lukewarm for this production, I was impressed by the acting, the dark sets that were made up to look like old lava beds surrounding the battlefields and the castle set , and the way the witches, ghosts and demons were presented. This was the first time I had seen "The Scottish Play" in live theater. It was written in 1606, three years after King James VI of Scotland united Scotland and England as James I. Old King Jim was big on witchcraft and apparently wanted a play to celebrate the legitimacy of his reign and the successful discovery of the nefarious Gunpowder Plot, which came close to blowing up the Parliament in November, 1605. (The Catholic Plotters, led by a certain Robert Catsby, a few other Catholics who wanted payback for the suppression of their religion, and an explosive expert named Guy Fawkes--for whom the holiday of course was named after--were all apprehended shortly before they could carry out their plans. They and a couple underground Jesuit leaders in England who got rounded up in the hysteria that followed--were summarily tortured, then drawn and quartered and executed as traitors.) But the play is set about 300 years earlier in the history of the Island, at a point just before James' distant relations come into the line of succession for king of Scotland.

All in all, a good show and a nice bit of a historical reminder that ambition without ethics will almost always lead to a bad end. By the sword or in the Federal Pen, as is the case for certain men of Wall Street in our own times.



Here's the director, Gale Edwards, veteran of Broadway and London productions, talking about the play: