Word: macduff
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Consider, for example, Scene IV.ii, in which we meet Macduff's wife and son for the first time, watch them engage in a tender family scene--and then are forced to watch in horror as they are murdered by Macbeth's soldiers. In this production, the pantomime of a soldier stabbing the child (played by Aaron Goldberg '01), his cry of "He has killed me, mother!" and his immediate collapse into lifelessness was greeted by the audience with a burst of laughter...
...than digging in with Shavian relentlessness. He focuses on three actors: William Charles Macready (Brian Bedford), the English Macbeth, a man with no life save work and drinking; Edwin Forrest (Victor Garber), the American Macbeth, a compulsive seducer; and John Ryder (Zeljko Ivanek), dogsbody to Macready and fill-in Macduff for Forrest, who comes alive only when being someone else. All three are splendid, as is Jack O'Brien's staging of the Broadway season's first substantial new American play. W.A.H.III
There are cinematic scene shifts, striking tableaux and, too late to help, affecting moments for Macduff and the wife and son whom he unknowingly abandons to their murder. At the end, Macbeth and Macduff duel in silhouette, then tumble behind a row of soldiers, so there is momentary doubt about who felled whom. But surely almost everyone knows the plot: such pseudo surprise is no substitute for the deeper astonishment of fresh insight into two of the great archetypes in world drama...
...been an axiom for soldiers. "All warfare is based on deception," said Sun Tzu, the great 4th century B.C. Chinese strategist whose prize pupil turned out to be Mao Tse-tung. The Greeks understood that principle when they set sail from Troy, leaving behind only a large wooden horse. Macduff knew it when he disguised his soldiers with branches from Birnam Wood as they marched against Macbeth. In World War II, the Allies created a phantom First U.S. Army Group, outfitted with rubber tanks and canvas landing barges (courtesy of the Shepperton movie studios). Its swirl of fake radio messages...
Bill McCann, as Macduff, starts weakly--see if his "Horror, horror, horror!" doesn't make you giggle--but gives a fine sympathetic portrait of this confused man. He is both savior and fool, diehard and blowhard, and when informed of the murder of his wife and children must "feel like a man." But he can't in public, so he just stands there, horrified, perplexed by this mad order which forces one to substitute country for family and torn by the guilt of leaving home. For once, words fail him, and the effect is illuminating...