Word: macbeths
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...tragedy of Macbeth, if it is to be meaningful, must work on an audience through clear and moving revelation of the stages in the disintegration of Macbeth's character. In any production of the play, the director and cast should consciously direct their full attention to this issue, or they may be tempted to over-exploit the dramatic effects offered by the play, and in so doing lose sight of its central movement...
Although director William Meador seems strongly interested in the psychology of Macbeth's progression from evil to evil, his concept of it is indecisive, and he has not avoided the danger of overemphasizing his effects. The present HDC production suffers seriously as a result. His idea of Macbeth's character seems unclear at the start of the play, and hence the subsequent interpretation is clouded and confusing...
...lack of orientation than from any failure in acting technique. His delivery is generally moving and expressive, and the mannerisms he has assumed for the part are quite acceptable. The heart of the trouble is the suggestion that neither he nor Meador is quite sure what is happening to Macbeth, or why, and as a result the audience cannot be deeply involved in his self-destruction...
Inhabiting Playwright Bagnold's Sussex manor house are a self-indulgent, irresponsible dowager who exerts a Lady Macbeth manner on trifles, her adolescent granddaughter who indulges in mischief and fabricates melodrama, a rather Shavian manservant who cannot bear being criticized, and upstairs, dying, a butler who for 40 years has ruled the household. Into it, as a companion for the granddaughter, comes a primly dressed woman with a superb and transforming knowledge of gardens, a gift for ingratiating herself with people, and an obviously beclouded past. How beclouded is made clear when a judge (Percy Waram...
...best tale is the description of a modern psychoanalyst's nightmare, which Russell subtitles "Adjustment--a Fugue." An unhappy analyst dreams--in a night of misgiving--that Shakespeare character, Macbeth, Lear, Hamlet, Othello, and several others, are turned into happy, well adjusted, normal--and frightfully dull-human beings...