Word: macbeth
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...meaning . . . it is blasphemy against the human spirit. . . . Furthermore, the language simply does not communicate to the listener." Several members of the audience rightly objected; for hope is one thing that is never extinguished in the play. One Harvard senior compared Pozzo's last speech with a speech in Macbeth for communicative power. Mr. Myerberg then had Rex Ingram deliver the speech again. It was obvious afterwards that Mr. Durgin was the only one present to whom the words communicated nothing...
...Macbeth did not strikingly differ as a production from the Old Vic's competent, rather than brilliant, Richard II and Romeo and Juliet. But it so much more powerfully reverberated as a play as to offer greater rewards. And much of its strength lay in what had been the earlier productions' weakness-the title roles: despite limitations, Macbeth and his lady made a striking pair...
...competent Macbeth may be expected to convey the rushing theater, the rising drama of the first three acts and the intense poetry of almost all the play. The Old Vic did both things and something more. It communicated what is so ominous, so Oedipus-like, in the prophecies that by seeming to shield Macbeth from Nemesis only speed him toward it. And it caught the play's feudal, barbaric, night-lighted atmosphere, the sense of a haunted world no less than a haunted...
...such harder tasks as countering the terrific fourth-act drop in pressure, or achieving truly tragic stature for Macbeth, the production failed. Paul Rogers' Macbeth was a heroic enough figure of evil, and at moments a man of intense, Hamlet-like imagination. But the difference between the two men that Saintsbury noted-that Macbeth can never leave off whereas Hamlet can never begin, so that Macbeth is increasingly ruthless and consistently unremorseful-is what makes Macbeth not easily tragic. Rogers could not convey what might make him so: an awful sense of alienation, of that
Coral Browne's Lady Macbeth also lacked depth, and failed in the sleepwalking scene. Yet, if theatrical, she was often commandingly so. And the two together went far beyond mere partnership in crime. Theirs was a fierce connubial bond that helped humanize a woman who all but lacks humanity and a man who all but loses...