Free Macbeth by William Shakespeare Page B

praised by many for the way in which the audience were forced to look at the play afresh. The absence of a sense of primordial evil was perhaps a reaction against, or at least an alternative to, the viewpoint presented by the groundbreaking Trevor Nunn production of 1976. By paring the play down to its essentials, Nunn created a palpable intensity and brooding sense of evil, which never let up. A circle painted on the floor of The Other Place studio theater encompassed the action of the play. Used as the main acting space, it symbolized a magic circle in which magicians stood for protection while conjuring and in which the evil of Macbeth would be exorcised. It also represented the “golden round,” the religious and ceremonial aspects of kinship.
    Trevor Nunn used the opening scene to illustrate the powerful sense apparent throughout the play of the forces of evil ranged against goodness. While Duncan and his court were at prayer, the three witches moved to the centre of the acting circle andbegan to groan and howl. Their voices became louder, until they drowned out the pious Duncan. 39
    Surrounded by darkness and with the absence of a formal raised stage, the actors performed on a bare floor.
    The audience—less than two hundred of them—sat on three sides of the acting area, two rows deep and elevated above the floor by scaffolding … The acting area was defined by a black painted circle round which the actors sat on packing-crates when not engaged in the performance. The audience could thereby see the witches outside the circle as they watched Macbeth fulfilling their prophecies, and see Macduff sitting ignorantly as his family is slaughtered … The cast was reduced to fourteen (about the number used when
Macbeth
was first performed) and there was some doubling. The audience … were so close to the actors that an extraordinary intimacy was created between them, and the words could be spoken quietly and subtly … the play was not so much about damnation as about the minds of the characters … In such plain, austere surrounding, the success of the production rested entirely on the actors. 40
    The success of the sparse setting of this production led other directors to reflect the psychological interior of their Macbeths in the set design. Discarding the attempt to recreate any recognizable interior, designers have sought to achieve a similar intimacy and intensity on the main Royal Shakespeare Theatre stage. Jonathan Pryce, who played Macbeth in 1986, said: “I don’t see this play set at some particular point where it would have immediate relevance to any particular society. It has resonances throughout time. When a play offers an overview of the human psyche, it seems too narrow to confine it.” 41
    In the production played by Pryce, directed by Adrian Noble, Bob Crowley’s set “was an illusionist’s box where any number of conjuror’s tricks might defeat the eye. Doors suddenly appeared, stairs shot out of flush walls. Then the walls themselves began to move.The Macbeths’ world got smaller and smaller until it felt like a coffin.” 42 The set was variously described as a “claustrophobic pressure chamber” 43 and an empty box with “a recessed platform surrounded by blank timber walls. It can be anywhere: a heath, the castle, the interior of the hero’s skull.” 44
    In 1993, Derek Jacobi starred as Macbeth and director Adrian Noble, returning to the play for a second time, made the lead performance the focus of the whole production. Designer Ian MacNeil explained:
    Derek is brilliant at taking you right inside someone’s head and exploring their deepest thoughts and emotions. I think that set helps us to do that. Its dark, interior quality allows the production to focus upon what is private and metaphysical in the central character. Basically the set is a black box … when colour is introduced it has far greater impact. Lady Macbeth’s first entrance in a crimson dress, the sumptuous banquet to