Word: macbeth
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...imposing pieces of work are on view in the production of Macbeth that John Houseman has directed for the American Shakespeare Festival. John Colicos, in the title role, provides the first. Jennifer Tipton is responsible for the second. No, she is not playing Lady Macbeth; she designed the lighting, which helps the show incalculably--but of this more anon...
...summers ago in Philadelphia. This was a portrayal carried through with subtlety and skill, substantially superior to what Sir John Gielgud had been able to do with the part on Broadway. And now, after nine years, Colicos has returned to the Festival to tackle the tremendous title role of Macbeth and to traverse it triumphantly. His success is all the more marked when one looks back to the Festival's previous bout with this play, in which Pat Hingle's Macbeth proved to be a foghorned fiasco...
...outside critic cannot tell exactly how much a director has contributed to a player's performance and how much is the player's own. The director must here be held accountable for the actual text that is used--and Macbeth presents an unusually high number of textual problems. There are no Macbeth quartos; we have only the version in the First Folio, published some dozen and a half years after the play was written, and even this is a corrupt text. Furthermore, no other Shakespeare play has more lines that are ambiguous in their meaning...
...rate, Colicos Macbeth is considerably younger than usual, though not at all invalid for being so. This Macbeth is a man of extra-ordinary physical energy, and one can understand at once why he has been so heroic a general in the field. Colicos makes clear that Macbeth would never have fallen into a career of evil if he had not been forcefully pushed into it by his wife (in fact, the early reign of the historical Macbeth was admirable--one of several aspects of Holinshed's Chronicles that Shakespeare suppressed or changed). This is not to deny Macbeth...
Anthony Mainionis' Haemon is adequate but somewhat colorless. Marian Hailey manages sufficiently to convey the weak-willed and vacillating Ismene--"infirm of purpose," to use Lady Macbeth's taunt. Antigones are rare, but Ismenes are a dime a dozen. Jane Farnol brings a good deal of warmth to the role of Antigone's devoted and solicitous old nurse. Richard Castellano, Edward Rutney, and Garry Mitchell, dressed in blue uniforms with red stripes, are fine as the three guards, who represent the majority of society; they are part of Creon's "featherheaded rabble." They are hard-drinking, vulgar-tongued, card-playing...