Word: macbeths
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...their own spooky lairs, but also as permeating regular society. Thus they are garbed as wives of members of the court, and are listed as Lady Angus, Lady Caithness, and an unspecified dowager. They often hover on the sidelines, and even take over the small role assigned to Lady Macbeth's servant. It is only in their incantatory privacy that they become obviously witchlike by donning half-masks. (Kahn of course omits the spurious interpolations involving Hecate, the patroness of witches; less commendably, he had done a little further cutting, though the production has a running-time of only...
Furthermore, the characters frequently cross themselves. And much is made of a crucifix from time to time; even one of the witches wears a pectoral cross. When Macbeth sits on his ill-gained throne and exclaims, "To be thus is nothing," he rips the cross from his chest and throws it to the floor, whence, in a neatly ironic touch, it is shortly picked up and handed back to him by the First Murderer...
...costumes, by Jane Green-wood, are prevailingly black, with white or gray trimming. The exceptions are good King Duncan, who wears the white of purity, and, similarly, Malcolm at his eventual coronation. After the murder of Duncan, Macbeth and his wife, in their hypocritically assumed purity, are the next appearance of white, to be followed by their blood-red robes in the daytime...
...garb in 20th-century environments is perfectly viable. One of the play's major themes is the wrenching of things out of their accustomed habitats, the appearance of people in "borrowed robes," the distortion of time. And the text is full of references to strange sounds ("every noise appals," Macbeth complains...
...fusing of the steel of modern architecture with the armor of medieval soldiers. Even the terrible knocking at the gate is not the usual pounding on wood but instead a clanking on metal. This is a cool, gray world. The huge portraits of Duncan and later of Macbeth and his wife, which are dropped down from the grid, are not colored oils; they are stark black-and-white photographs. Touches of color in this production are rare, and thus all the more striking...