Fair is Foul and Foul is New in Revitalized Macbeth

Only Patrick Stewart’s boots are visible as he descends on the industrial elevator lodged in the back of Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Harvey Theater stage to say his familiar first line as the title character in Macbeth. “So foul and fair a day I have not seen” is perhaps the most recognizable part of what is happening on stage, as the noblemen are clad in Soviet-influenced military uniforms and the witches are dressed as hospital nurses. Behind the apparent shock-value of director Rupert Goold’s new interpretation, however, is a carefully constructed modernization intended to capture the nature of the haunting “Scottish play” whose supposedly cursed name superstitious thespians have feared saying aloud for centuries.

At a post-show discussion Sunday, moderated by none other than Columbia English professor and academic superstar James Shapiro, leading actor Patrick Stewart talked about any modern actor’s inability to know exactly how to play such a familiar role. There’s no one in the audience, he said, who had not heard his monologues before. When Shapiro started off one of his sentences with “Since Burbage isn’t here...” (referring, of course, to Richard Burbage, the 17th-century actor for whom roles such as Hamlet and Lear were written and who is believed to have originated the title role in Macbeth), Stewart quickly interjected with a resounding, “If only he were!”

Almost since the time of Burbage’s death, though, experienced actors and directors have striven to understand Shakespearean text by revising it to make it more relatable to current audiences. Stewart and Shapiro agreed that changing outdated words to further audience comprehension is an acceptable practice: the line “lave our honors” in Act III, Scene 2, for example, was changed to “bathe our honors” for the purposes of appealing to the average BAM audience member, who has likely never heard the word “lave.” The actor and the scholar, each world-renowned in his respective profession, preempted their critics on this point with the simple assertion that, after all, changing lines is how actors in Shakespeare’s time would have treated archaic portions of text.

But the modernization of this particular Macbeth goes far beyond mere textual modifications. From the cold, barren set to the militaristic Soviet costuming, the production is not subtle in depicting an authoritarian, dictatorial regime—video footage of Stalinist Russia serves to reinforce the notion of totalitarianism, bringing the character of Macbeth into full view as a tyrannical madman fueled by power and ceaseless paranoia.

Of course, any director can dress all the characters in a Shakespearean tragedy in gangster garb and flapper dresses and technically “set” his or her production in the Roaring Twenties, for example. But these weak transpositions of Shakespeare texts into a specific historical time period often fail due to halfhearted efforts to sustain them—they rely too much on visual aspects or on the audience’s ignorance toward the more intricate elements of Shakespearean theater.

This Macbeth displays no such halfhearted effort. The allegory is carefully intertwined with the original play, allowing each line—even when spoken by a character in full Russian military garb—never to stray from its Shakespearean grounding. “Everything is in the text,” Stewart said after his performance on Sunday.

At a media talk on Macbeth, Stewart discussed his intense preparatory study of Stalin, describing how he bought all the books on the real historical figure that he could find in order to better understand his fictional character’s cruel motives. Reading one in particular, a book by Martin Amis, Stewart’s study became less an academic experience and more a study of how an individual could achieve the murderous depths of Stalin: “It was not so much a historical document,” he recalled, “but an examination of the murderous machinations of an individual’s mind. I would come in each morning bringing these tales of the next horrible thing that I’d learned that Stalin had done and sometimes we would try to introduce them into the production.”

Stewart’s interest was constantly to emphasize the play’s human element, extracting, as he put it, emotions that are “human and real and pitiful.” The historical allegory, then, serves not only to give the audience a referential time period, but also to turn the characters onstage into real people. By understanding, in Stewart’s words, “the monster that at times was Joseph Stalin,” he could understand “the monster that a lot of the time Macbeth was.” While many productions of Macbeth seek to vilify the title character into an almost inhuman entity, this production seeks to do the opposite—create a title character plagued by fear and painfully aware of what he is doing. Stewart’s portrayal of the fictional Macbeth draws on the murderous capabilities of an actual historical figure, allowing the character to take on depths of reality that might otherwise not be found.

And, of course, it helps to have a leading actor capable of pulling off such an undertaking convincingly. Although best known for his role as Captain Jean-Luc Picard on Star Trek, Stewart’s extensive Shakespearean stage credits include a lengthy tenure with the Royal Shakespeare Company between 1966 and 1982. Although the role has eluded him until now, he is no stranger to Macbeth, nor has he been since childhood—as a “precocious 14 year old,” he recollected wandering in the woods and reciting the play’s famous speeches aloud. When asked if he had to relearn them for this production, Stewart replied, “I had to relearn them accurately.”

Although his response was in jest, the actual reexamination of Shakespearean text that took place for this production is considered by many to be a necessary reality in the 21st century. With a talented young director and an experienced actor at the helm, the final product is one that should not be missed by anyone even remotely interested in Shakespeare. Whether or not you like their interpretation, the creative rethinking of a four-century-old text to keep it fresh and original represents precisely what has kept the Bard popular for so long. His subject is still pertinent; his words are still meaningful. This is Shakespeare as it was meant to be performed.