Word: macbeths
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...rate, Shakespeare created his weirdest world--universe, I should perhaps say--in Macbeth. And its words somehow penetrate to the very marrow of one's bones and take possession of one's whole being; Shakespeare here reaches in us the three states he has plumbed so deeply in his characters: the conscious, the sub-conscious, and the unconscious. The last two are states that we today really understand little better than do the characters in the play; the people in Macbeth are constantly baffled (what other play contains such a large proportion of questions?), and so are we. Much...
...great deal of the play's aura of horror is captured in the current Cambridge Drama Festival production, directed by Jose Quintero. This is young Mr. Quintero's first Shakespearean assignment, although he has wrought several nearmiracles with modern American works. And he has attacked Macbeth with freshness and, at times, audacity. He has given us a sufficiently fast-moving production of Shakespeare's fastest-moving play. The theatre quivers with excitement as characters swirl about the set, and race up and down the aisles to envelop the audience in the action (though this is carried somewhat to excess...
...time (and it contributes so much that I urge you to attend an evening rather than a daytime performance). Hays is not afraid to keep many of his light levels low, which is right since so much of the play takes place either at night or under dark clouds. Macbeth's hallucinatory ghosts at the banquet are effected entirely by lighting: this is also a wise decision, for Banquo (and then Duncan?) should no more walk in and sit down at the table here than should an actual dagger be lowered from the ceiling in an earlier scene...
...suggest the red lacquer of China rather than the rough furniture of medieval Scotland). Marie Day has designed suitable costumes; and Richard Baldridge has devised musical and sound effects, for percussion or bagpipes, that are more primitive than one normally finds in a Shakespearean production--but then I suppose Macbeth's milieu was quite primitive...
Robards does, nevertheless, have his effective points here. He has grown his own heavy beard, and looks like Macbeth. He is able to convey much of what is in Macbeth's mind through his facial expressions, especially his eyes. Many of his movements are laudable, as when, in his prebanquet conversation with his wife, he prowls restlessly around the stage like an animal, which is what he is gradually becoming (later Macduff even calls him "hellhound...