Theatre’s Ritual Power
A director and Shakespeare-lover analyzes a recent production of Macbeth.
By Raquel Sequeira
For all that the play can be read as a psychoanalytical gold mine, there’s a reason Macbeth is to this day cloaked in superstition. The prologue of Sam Gold’s recent production in Manhattan even began with a cheeky invitation to the audience to whisper together the cursed name, “Macbeth.” Theatre always has incantatory possibility simply by bringing embodied humans into shared space and time. Audience and actors alike put their faith in a theatrical magic that breathes into scripted words and blocked movements unruly life.
This duality of theatre—surprise within scriptedness, chaos within constraint—is a mixture of performance and ritual. As a director, I use tools of performance such as movement and diction to communicate some truth to the audience. Yet I am also open to the mystical power of ritual: through the spoken words, the embodied characters, and even the presence of the audience. I feel a tingling awareness that anything could happen in the moment onstage. This is an art form of communicating and listening in real time and space: a conversation.
One of the joys of theatre is that comprehension breeds comprehension. Almost always, the audience understands the lines if and only if the actor speaking them does. When I began working with actors in another illustrious production of Macbeth (namely, the 4th and 5th graders of Rivendell School in Arlington, Virginia), they sounded like they were speaking a different language—because they were. I remember pulling aside a youthful King Duncan to explain that if “the Norweyan banners flout the sky and fan our people cold,” it means that Norway, Scotland’s enemy, has won the battle and is flying their flags (1.2.157). I saw understanding and confidence dawn on his fresh face. The next time he practiced the scene, the words were translated without a single hand gesture. In contrast, as I listened to Daniel Craig and his castmates perform on Broadway, a certain je ne sais quoi suggested that line-by-line care and curiosity for the text had been not been the priority in the rehearsal room.
Even more magical than translation is when a production transforms Shakespeare’s language. For four and a half centuries, humans across the globe have been reincarnating the same words in different worlds, revealing more layers of meaning through the juxtaposition with new contexts. Macbeth in particular is a play full of weird language that I hoped might find new life in this production. To my disappointment, Gold often seemed to be fighting rather than collaborating with the text. King Duncan, for example, was portrayed as a doddering Trumpian tyrant, creating a confusing clash with all the lines about the goodness—nay, holiness—of this king.
A glimmering exception, however, was Amber Gray’s Banquo. Gray seemed to anchor her performance in the scenes between Banquo and her son, Fleance, showing how this nurturing relationship might be the reason Banquo responds so differently to the witches’ prophecy than the childless Macbeth. I get shivers thinking about the scene when murderers sent by Macbeth come upon the mother and son. The scene on the page reads like this:
Enter Banquo and Fleance, with a torch.
SECOND MURDERER A light, a light!
THIRD MURDERER ’Tis he.
FIRST MURDERER Stand to ’t.
BANQUO, to Fleance It will be rain tonight.
FIRST MURDERER Let it come down!
The three Murderers attack. (3.3.23)
Rather than having the murderers in hiding until Banquo’s last line, Gray delivered “It will be rain tonight” staring down the barrel of a gun pointed at her son; then she wrapped her body around him and took the bullet. These are the theatre moments I live for.
This emotional vulnerability—of both performers and audience—is the key to theatre’s ritual power. Yet Macbeth reminds us that there is also something risky about imagining and communing in this way. What we “perform” in the sense of “play-act” we could actually “perform” in the sense of “carry out.” For all its meta-theatricality, Gold’s production undermined its own power—and the power of the art form itself—by denying the reality of this risk.
Macbeth reminds us that there is something risky about imagining and communing through play-acting. What we “perform” in the sense of “play-act” we could actually “perform” in the sense of “carry out.”
Gold’s Macbeth began with the “witches” stirring an actual stew at the edge of the stage. Anyone familiar with the play might have felt a twinge of excitement. The traditional hags had been replaced with a homey-looking family, their cauldron with an innocuous pot on a hot plate. It was a promising start, reminiscent of all the horror movies set in classic suburban neighborhoods, knowing that evil is more terrifying when it’s close to home. The witches nearly made good on this horror genre throughout the play by repeatedly dismembering the same actor, adding his blood and bits to their stew (was it the same one they’d been cooking since the beginning?), all with gentle movement and tender physicality. But then the actor stood up. The ambiguous awfulness was quickly dissipated. It was as if the actors were worried we might forget that it’s all make believe.
The ending redoubles this patronizing. Right before Macbeth’s head was ceremoniously removed—and right after he had slipped in the puddles of blood spewing from his thigh—dinner was served. The entire company came out on stage and sat against the wall to eat the soup that was set simmering at the beginning. Macduff’s murdered child sang a song as she ladled out soup. Macbeth—or Craig—took his bowl with a smile of relief. Whether this was supposed to be part of the play or simply meta-theatre, the message was one of safety. Threats of tyranny, violence, and the supernatural, we were meant to understand, are not real threats.
The problem is that they are. Macbeth is a timelessly powerful play because, for all its weirdness, it really does hit too close to home. In the spirit of accessible Shakespeare, Gold’s prologue included a description of how the play was “commissioned” by James I, a Scottish king paranoid to distraction about demonic forces. Ignoring the historical inaccuracy (King James never “commissioned” any of Shakespeare’s plays), this context makes Macbeth all the more remarkable for the way it portrays human wickedness as actually worse than supernatural. Macbeth goes from being one of the last loyal subjects to murdering a wholly upright king, then murdering his best friend, then murdering an entire family. The witches, meanwhile, never do much more than throw some pretty gruesome animal parts into a pot. Their bark is worse than their bite.
But King James’s witch hunting was only the tip of the cultural iceberg. After narrowly escaping the Gunpowder Plot, the root of human evil became the theological question of the hour. How could you tell if the men plotting to blow up parliament were demon possessed or just . . . bad men? Macbeth portrays the tension between these two possibilities—perhaps their coexistence—through the distinctive language of the title character, who often examines his own interior struggles as if he feels possessed by something other:
My thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical,
Shakes so my single state of man
That function is smothered in surmise,
And nothing is but what is not. (1.3.152)
I was left wanting more of this magic: more connection between the characters and their lines; more engagement with the problem of evil; more true danger.
Whether Macbeth really is possessed, mentally ill, or unmoored from the knowledge of good and evil, it’s clear that Shakespeare wants to confute any easy explanations of human wickedness. The Macbeths are undeniably accountable for the murder of Duncan. Indeed, the certainty of this guilt imprints itself on Lady Macbeth’s mind (and body) and ultimately destroys her. Yet perhaps the Macbeths are not to blame for their susceptibility to temptation. Macbeth’s mind when he encounters the witches is full of the violence of battle; and when Lady Macbeth receives his letters, she is alone and powerless as the childless wife of a minor noble. Rather than humoring King James’s witch fever, these complications of human evildoing evoke God’s warning to the first murderer: “Sin crouches at the door. Its desire is for you, but you must rule over it.”
This is the terrifying chasm of human agency that Shakespeare always presents to us. We always have a choice. And though Macbeth is often read as a play about the role of fate, it puts enchanted language into the actors’ mouths. Lady Macbeth literally conjures spirits—a bold move for a playwright trying to stay in the good graces of a king who’s terrified of witches. Even the obligatory scene of comic relief juxtaposes Shakespeare’s trademark sexual punning with a deeper comment on religious language. Macbeth’s porter imagines himself as the gatekeeper of hell, where, along with an adulterer and a suicide victim, he welcomes an “equivocator” to “the everlasting bonfire” (2.3.12). Unlike Church-of-Englanders, Catholics under Queen Elizabeth and King James risked death by speaking their own liturgies aloud. Equivocation was a papally-sanctioned workaround. It amounted to saying one thing out loud while saying another your head on the assumption that omnipotent God would hear you just fine. But Macbeth’s porter sees an obvious flaw: If you don’t say it aloud, how do you know you meant it?
A director wanting to make a statement about the power of theatre couldn’t ask for better material. Yet in Gold’s self-conscious production, the metaphysics of language was drowned out by dick jokes. In a production otherwise allergic to cliché, Paul Lazar as the porter supplied an overdose of classic Elizabethan thrusting. And although the scene as written already breaks the fourth wall as effectively as any Brechtian disciple could wish—the “knock knock knock”-ing on the gates of hell are really Macduff knocking on the door of Macbeth’s castle—Lazar delivered another moment of direct address to the audience, this one more forced than the prologue and crass to boot.
By the end of the play, Macbeth’s interiority, Lady Macbeth’s conjury, Duncan’s holy liturgy, and even the witches’ nursery-rhyme sorcery is silenced. Instead, “voices are in swords” (5.8.9). After the final battle and the slaying of Macbeth, the newly-crowned King Malcolm of Scotland promises to restore “order . . . measure . . . and grace on grace” (all of which were key principles of King James’s update to the prayer book for Anglican liturgies). But it’s far too little too late. Language and the world are in chaos.
Gold’s production similarly wants to soothe our fears before we leave the theatre, as if watching the cast eat soup onstage like a happy family will make us forget that a moment ago, they were eating a man’s pureed leg. Instead, the ending comes across as flippant to the brutal experience of this play. Even more, this deconstruction diminishes the power of theatre. Though there may not be a true relationship between cast and audience, what we share is our surrender to the magic of the stage. Gold’s ending breaks the spell.
As one of the first new shows on Broadway since the pandemic, I believe Gold is right to remind us of the power of our presence, to convince us that we are all witches and theatre-makers. Indeed, the physicality of Gold’s production was bewitching. To an audience programmed to recoil from human contact, the excess of touches and hugs between actors in passing, the lavishness of Ruth Negga’s embodiment of Lady Macbeth, even the satisfying sharpness of Craig’s Hollywood-trained knife hand felt like a kind of rebirth. Yet I was still left wanting more of this magic: more connection between the characters and their lines; more engagement with the problem of evil; more true danger.
“We are all witches and theatre-makers” was the phrase that popped into my head as I watched Gold’s Macbeth. Unfortunately, the production failed to converse well: It neither listened to the words of Shakespeare’s play nor sought to make itself understood by the audience. Gold chose the right play at the right time. He just missed an opportunity to collaborate with Shakespeare in bringing us into the coven.
Raquel Sequeira is a freelance dramaturg and a graduate student in the History and Philosophy of Science.