Bringing Originality to Lady M
Lady Macbeth is one of the most exciting and challenging female roles in Shakespeare, and so I feel very lucky to have had the chance to perform the part. The year was 2001 and the venue was the Gilded Balloon, Edinburgh. The company who put the show on were called Love and Madness. They had a few contemporary twists for their version of Macbeth and though they cut lines (slots at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival are usually only an hour or so) there was a huge emphasis on understanding the text and speaking the verse correctly. In fact, I owe a lot of my ability to they way in which they rehearsed us.
Promenade Theatre
The contemporary twist to the show was that the production was set in the sixties, the Macbeth’s owned a pub ‘The Glamis Arms’ (which showed the famous victory match against Germany on it as people entered the theatre) and King Duncan was more of a king pin. The Macbeths were essentially gangsters like the Krays taking over more and more territory. There are some purists who hate new twists on Shakespeare, but as long as the verse is spoken as Shakespeare intended and the new context fits well, I think it’s a great way to keep Shakespeare current and accessible to new audiences. We also performed amongst the audience, so the whole audience were sitting in our pub and those sitting on the front tables became a part of the famous banquet scene.
“Cursed with unoriginality at every turn.”
The challenge with playing Lady M is that so many people have played her so it’s easy to feel cursed with unoriginality at every turn. The words ‘out damn spot’ are so familiar it’s a challenge to make them spontaneous and your own. I was given the great advice that by being me, the part was already different. And that took a lot of pressure off. But I still wanted to get as much depth into the text as possible and what did I know of murder? So, in order to research (no, fortunately I’m not a method actor, but I am studious) I created a Book of Stabbings. Which, as it sounds, was a book where I kept articles on real stabbings. And I flicked through the stories a lot. And maybe that’s a bit dark but I wanted my request to Macbeth to mean what it really meant. And it must seep into your subconscious because as we performed the play up in Scotland that summer, I had some gory dreams. One involving coming into my flat which, in real life had just had new carpets put it, in the dream the carpets squelched under my feet. They were squelching because they were soaked in blood, and then I opened the bottom drawer of a chest of drawers to discover the body of someone I knew, and let’s just say they were incomplete!
Preparing for the role
Fortunately my co-director Kim’s idea of researching the part was less bloody. He decided that a way to get in touch with the imagery and to work the breath would be to speak verse whilst climbing up Arthur’s Seat one evening at dusk (a massive hill that over looks Edinburgh). Lady Macbeth summons evil powers from nature to help her seize the opportunity of killing Duncan whilst he’s staying at their house. So, Kim I and I climbed the seat looking for weird signs to help the poetry take on a life of its own. Weirdly, if you look for signs, they suddenly seem everywhere and we had quite a mystical experience as well as having a good lung work out.
As well as Lady M’s prayers to the dark forces, there are also the witches spells. It is thought that Shakespeare used real spells in the play and that is what curses those who put the play on. Even now, for part tradition and part superstition you shouldn’t ever name the play whilst in another theatre, and so it is always referred to as ‘The Scottish Play“. There are lots of stories about productions of Macbeth where weird things happened; accidents, coincidences. I couldn’t comment. But not long after we performed Macbeth at the Gilded Balloon, the theatre tragically burnt down. So who knows…..
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