Shakedowns of Shakespeare scramble the settings. Here’s Romeo and Juliet as cokehead Californians, King Lear as a cattle baron, and Titus Andronicus as an ombudsman. But the text remains sacrosanct – Emma Rice’s nibbling at the pentameters of A Midsummer Night’s Dream irking Globe purists as recently as 2016.
So I was surprised when, at the end of March, the director Wils Wilson invited me, a stand-up comedian, to collaborate with Shakespeare himself, who needed some jokes beefed up in Macbeth, her debut for the Royal Shakespeare Company.
Wilson wanted to retool the comic turn, the gatekeeper called a Porter. “The jokes are pretty unintelligible now,” she said. “English tailors and French hose? Executed Jesuit priests? I want them to be understandable, satirical and funny, but in that sinister, dark way they are in the original. The Porter is the gatekeeper of Hell after all.” I canvassed opinion.
My son, earbud-deep in Macbeth GCSE, said: “That makes sense. Obviously Shakespeare’s clowns were different in every production, and fitted in what was then in the news.” So I accepted Wilson’s offer. And unlike the anonymous acts who write the panel show shtick and stadium spiel of popular comedians, the RSC was to credit me, though not exactly as I asked, “Macbeth – by William Shakespeare, with additional funny material by Stewart Lee” proving too much of a reach.
Wilson’s offer reawakened my adolescent entanglements with Shakespeare. In 1980 my mum, sensing I had ambitions beyond my station, took me to see my first ever Shakespeare in Stratford. Donald Sinden blacked up as Othello, the last white actor to do so at the RSC. A 12-year-old Specials fan, I had an inkling that things were changing. Some aspects of Shakespearean practice could benefit from updating. But our next RSC trip fried my teenage mind.
Howard Davies’ Macbeth had everything the teenage post-punk could want: a chrome scaffolding set; guys in polo necks playing LinnDrums like Tubeway Army; and Josette Simon, who all adolescent boys fancied in the ropey BBC sci-fi Blake’s 7, as a witch in a leotard.
Unsurprisingly, I now spent my Saturdays on the X50 bus, snagging £5 standing tickets to the mid-eighties RSC oeuvre. Ralph Steadman’s visceral Macbeth poster still graces my home 40 years later. Though I’d never given it any thought, it depicts the Porter himself, drunkenly jangling keys, giving me permission.
As did Wilson. “The scene is a complete one-off – unlike anything else in Shakespeare. Some say it’s the invention of stand-up, though I am sure that’s not true,” she offered. “The material is dark, satirical, current, political, risky, dealing with hypocrisy, lies, morality, sex, drunkenness – all the good stuff. And the Porter breaks the fourth wall and speaks directly to the audience. No one else does that in the play except Macbeth. And it is – apparently – when the knock, knock joke was invented.”
Wilson had already cast the fearless Scottish actor Alison Peebles as her Porter, which helped. I remembered comedic avatars of judgment, similar to the Porter, that I had seen over the years. Jerry Sadowitz, attacking the values of every section of his hell-bound crowd; and the feisty female Scottish comedians who impressed me as a younger man – Lynn Ferguson spitting fire as resident compere at the Red Rose in Finsbury Park 30 years ago, the velvet gloved fist of Janey Godley, the gatling gun offence of the much-missed Jane Mackay, destroying drunken audiences after midnight at The Stand in Edinburgh in the 90s. In homage to these voices, I swapped out the corrupt tailors and judiciaries of the original for the damned-to-hell celebrities, politicians and grifters of today. And I got in two covert lines of Lenny Bruce’s, a private joke for myself.
The second section of the scene, when the Porter engages in a torturous riff on impotence with Lennox and Macduff, is like a music hall “front curtain” act, performed while the scene behind resets. Are we waiting for Macbeth to wash off Duncan’s blood?
In 1979, the year before I saw my first Shakespeare, I saw my last childhood pantomime – Les Dawson and the variety survivor stooge Eli Woods in Babes in the Wood at the Birmingham Hippodrome. Three years later I saw the Comic Strip’s Peter Richardson opening there for Dexy’s Midnight Runners, by which time the cocksure alternative comedians had dated Dawson’s gently Rabelaisian routines. Wading curiously through old clips years later I saw a gangling Woods, a sparkling Roy Castle, and a curmudgeonly Jimmy James doing Jimmy Jewel’s definitive “giraffe in a box” bit on a 1970s Parkinson. It seemed oddly familiar.
Was it possible Woods and Dawson had hand-cranked the routine into their panto? Inspired, I approached the Porter’s interaction with Lennox and MacDuff as music hall cross-talk, taking care to keep the non-mechanicals banter in iambic pentameter.
On Friday, I’ll have my first privileged look at whatever Wilson and Peebles are doing with my now orphaned text. But replaying the Porter scene not as a stifled Shakespearean set piece, but as actual live comedy, means it will only exhale when it meets an audience. And then, in the days before press night, it will require the same rapid reassembly actual comedians routinely apply.
It’s an incredible experience for me, being asked to contribute to Macbeth. I wish my mum could have seen it. The lock of her Austin Maxi froze, I remember, in the snow of the frozen pre-climate-change, post-Macbeth RSC riverside carpark, and she told me to piss on it to free it up. She would have been proud of how that theatre trip paid off. I emailed my old English tutor, in contrast, the day after Wilson’s offer, to tell her the news. It was 1 April. She assumed, all too perfectly, that it was an April Fool. Remember the Porter.
Playing for laughs
Everyone loves a joker, but a Shakespearean fool is another matter. They can be very hard to find funny without context. It is not that the Bard was not good at banter, which seems unlikely, but that much of the double meanings, innuendo and straight-up parody now fall flat. Actors who take lots of liberties with the text frequently have greater success, like Rhys Ifans’ court jester, who teased and cajoled Glenda Jackson’s King Lear at the Old Vic.
More reliable laughs can be found in the little scenes of so-called “comic relief” that break up the action, and indeed the brutal murdering, in a play such as Macbeth. But the drunken Porter, or castle gatekeeper, in that tragedy has a lot to say about treason and theology, then quite a bit about “brewers’ droop” in his 170 lines, and most of it is incomprehensible today without the guidance of a glossary and some emphatic gestures. As a result, the “porter scene” is regularly cut.
Now, with the ever-popular Scottish Play due to be staged several times in the next six months – one production featuring David Tennant as the wannabe king and another Ralph Fiennes – the public will be able to compare and contrast their porters, or to note his absence.
Comedians and stand-ups often have greater success than mainstream actors as the “comic relief”. And it is the silly part of Bottom, one of the “rude mechanicals” in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, that has drawn most of them to try. Back in 1958 Frankie Howerd played the part of the enchanted weaver and Benny Hill had a go in 1967. Next came Ronnie Barker in 1971 and Dawn French donned the ass’s ears in 2001. Recently the former comedy partners David Walliams and Matt Lucas have both been cast, with Walliams’ portrayal, opposite Sheridan Smith’s infatuated Titania, winning ovations in the West End and Lucas appearing in 2016 in the BBC film which starred Maxine Peake as the fairy queen.
Other notable Shakespearean comic turns in parts that amount to more than just light relief include George Robey in the role of Falstaff to Olivier’s Henry V, both on stage in 1935 and on film. And Ken Dodd’s Liverpool performances as the pompous Malvolio, in Twelfth Night, in 1971 have gone down in history.
So when Scottish actor Alison Peebles steps on to the Stratford-upon-Avon stage as the naughty Porter in Act 2, Scene 3, ready to speak Stewart Lee’s new lines, she will become part of a fine, ignoble tradition. Vanessa Thorpe
• This article was amended on 10 July 2023 to better describe Alison Peebles as an actor; a previous version described her as a “comic”.
• Macbeth is at the RSC, Stratford, 19 August to 14 October. Stewart’s Basic Lee show’s ongoing tour dates are here. A fun-size™ ® version of the show is at The Stand’s New Town Theatre in Edinburgh from 11-20 August
