Word: macbeths
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Macbeth is also endowed with a hypersensitive imagination. Colicos constantly reacts in little ways to the strange sounds that abound around Inverness Castle (this production has a highly active off-stage soundtrack). The dagger soliloquy comes after he dozes off on a bench; he starts to hallucinate in a half-awake state, and seems hardly to be aware of his own real dagger, which he draws but then drops on the floor. When he goes upstairs to murder Duncan, he carries his dagger behind his back. On returning, he holds two bloody daggers in one hand--again behind his back...
...wrong. And director Houseman was right to substitute a weak red spotlight instead (which has the added virtue of avoiding a decision as to whether one of the two appearances is the ghost of Duncan rather than of Banquo). The apparitions are hallucinatory and visible only to Macbeth. It makes no more sense to bring in a ghost visible to all the banqueters and to us than to lower a dagger on a string for the earlier soliloquy (and the true ghost appearances in Hamlet and Julius Caesar are in no wise analogous...
...Macbeth sees the first apparition on a downstage stool. Lady Macbeth has to pick up the stool and smash it to the floor in order to snap him out of his hallucination. The second time, the apparition has moved to the upstage throne. Macbeth, tormented by this vision, sees only one care; in a furious and frightening burst of violence, he overthrows the tables between him and it, and hurls himself into the kingly seat--an act of inordinate courage. (This table-throwing works supremely well here, as it did not when Paul Scofield did the same thing in Peter...
With guests scattered and Macbeth alone, Colicos comes downstage and puts a hand to his temple as though plagued by a fearsome migraine. The banquet hall darkens and is subjected to a continuously moving mottled light, whereupon we hear the Witches for the last time. This staging makes it seem that Macbeth's final encounter with the Witches is one more hallucination...
After Lady Macbeth's mind has cracked under the strain, Macbeth nearly throttles the Doctor for his inability to cure her. Gradually he becomes more and more disillusioned. When the last charm proves hollow and Macduff relates his Caesarean birth, Colicos does not yell his reply ("Accursed be that tongue that tells me so."), as usually done, but rather delivers it very effectively at a soft level...