After killing King Duncan and two guards to claim the Scottish throne, Macbeth laments that all the oceans of the world can not wash clean his hands, which would make “the multitudinous seas incarnadine”. This year, it is the play that has been multitudinous as, in the last six months, I’ve watched five Macbeths turn stages across England red with gore.
David Tennant and Cush Jumbo, playing the Macbeths at the Donmar Warehouse in London, follow Ralph Fiennes and Indira Varma (Liverpool Depot, now touring), Reuben Joseph and Valene Kane (RSC, Stratford-upon-Avon), Mike Noble and Laura Elsworthy for English Touring Theatre (starting at Shakespeare Playhouse North in Prescot, now on the road) and Max Bennett and Matti Houghton (Shakespeare’s Globe, London).
Few plays receive such close showings – if it happened with A Midsummer Night’s Dream, I’d leave the country – but Macbeth is such a deep and ambiguous work that the repetition never became fatiguing and raised many questions about why and how to perform the 1606 tragedy.
Why is 2023 the year of Macbeth?
Five Conservative prime ministers in eight years – with some in the party seemingly agitating for six in nine – inevitably makes topical a play about a failing state and threatened leaders. But, where this year’s earlier Macbeths were clearly inflected by national politics, the latest show more international influence, from the wars in Ukraine and Gaza. Simon Godwin’s production is approached, on Frankie Bradshaw’s set, though a wasteland of bombed buildings and burning trucks.
Were Macbeth’s predecessor and successor better bets?
In the course of Macbeth, Scotland has three kings - Duncan, Macbeth and Malcolm. And a vital directorial decision is the relative merits of these leaders. The Macbeths of Fiennes, Bennett and Noble all have strikingly comic, clownish moments – such as on the line, “Twas a rough night”, after the first three murders – that seem to invoke the inappropriate comedy of Boris Johnson and Liz Truss and the general unsuitability to power of recent leaders in the UK and US. (The Fiennes-Varma version, directed by Godwin, goes next year to the Shakespeare theatre that Godwin runs in Washington DC, where Macbeth will also have an American relevance, as two ageing political kings, Biden and Trump, fight for a cursed throne.)
An effect of this reading is to make Duncan (as has happened with Theresa May) seem more impressive in retrospect, encouraged by younger and stronger kings – Ross Walton for English Touring Theatre (ETT), Keith Fleming in the Fiennes version – than used to be the case. In the Donmar production, directed by Max Webster, Benny Young’s monarch vigorously dances reels on the last night of his life. This sparkier casting solves the plot obstacle that, in some past productions, the King seemed unlikely to get through the night at Glamis castle even if he hadn’t been stabbed to death.
Both the RSC and Globe cast Duncan female, with Tamzin Griffin and Therese Bradley playing vigorous queens, whose removal by Macbeth makes the regicide a patriarchal restoration, a feminist interpretation further complicated by his wife’s involvement in the plot to kill a queen. Logically, this reading also raises the question of why, if women can rule Scotland, Lady Macbeth doesn’t seize power for herself, rather than run the campaign of a reluctant husband.
In Abigail Graham’s production at the Globe, it was explicit that the nervy, nerdy Malcolm of Joseph Payne risked being Liz Truss to Bennett’s Johnson – further shattering already lowered expectations. Godwin’s version is more optimistic about succession. Ewan Black’s Malcolm, a man of integrity in a green sweater, seems clearly to invoke Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskiy, whose victory has extra resonance due to the increasingly Putinesque feel of Fiennes’ paranoid strongman Scottish king. Godwin implicitly manifests Russia’s defeat by Ukraine.
Tennant is succeeded by Ros Watt’s strikingly young, near-teenage Malcolm, which can be seen as either advocacy for countries to put faith in younger generations or a warning against the gamble of doing so.
What happened to Lady Macbeth’s baby?
Lady Macbeth has “given suck”, but the couple are childless. All five versions intensely explore her fertility and maternal instincts. To shrieks of “Ew!” from school parties, the ETT version – directed by Richard Twyman – begins with the clearly bereaved character expressing milk with a breast pump and storing the latest bottle alongside rows of others in a fridge, dramatising the physical cruelty that mothers who lose babies continue to lactate. At the RSC and Globe, Lady M sculpted a fake baby out of clothes or bedsheets. Startlingly, Fiennes kneels before Varma and speaks the line, “Bring forth men children only”, directly into her reproductive areas.
Lady Macbeth has become a stereotype of manipulative wifely power over a supposedly weaker husband – a charge made (falsely) in recent history against Hillary Clinton and Cherie Blair. Actors are understandably nervous of perpetuating this slur so Kane at the RSC and Houghton at the Globe made the character more skittish and nervous than usual, suggesting that Lady Macbeth’s clear mental illness in the sleep-walking and blood-washing scene in Act 5 (“out damned spot, out!”) may have had an earlier onset, perhaps in the death of her child.
After the disastrous dinner party attended by the dead Banquo, Tennant delivers the lines “Come, we’ll to sleep” and “we are but young in deed” to his wife with the seeming meaning that they might conceive another child that night. But Jumbo blanks him and heads in the apparent direction of a separate bedroom. In the brutal denouement, Tennant cuddles Young Siward and seems tempted to adopt him before giving the child the ending required by the stage direction. The Donmar programme includes an essay on “postpartum depression” and, while sleepwalking, Jumbo holds the hand and pats the head of an imaginary/remembered child.
So the play previously seen as a political/marital psychodrama now seems viewed as a parental tragedy.
What is the role of the witches?
In Wils Wilson’s RSC staging, the witches were clearly supernatural, spookily materialising through the stage. At the Globe, they were very human or inhuman men in white forensic scene-of-crime overalls, wheeling autopsy gurneys around the stage to receive each of the play’s eight corpses. Also serving as malevolent stage managers are the three sisters who stalk Fiennes, given exits and entrances unimagined by Shakespeare, unnervingly observing their prophecies playing out.
Tennant’s prophetic voices may exist only in his mind – unseen, they heckle and giggle on sound designer Gareth Fry’s binaural backing track played in the headphones worn by the audience.
Can the Porter scene ever work?
Directors and scholars often fret about the second scene of Act 3 where, after the murder of Duncan, the Porter of Hell-Gate comes on for a scene of standup comedy about who has been sent to damnation (Catholics) and the effects of excessive drinking on urination and erections. The abrupt change of tone and possibly author (some think it was improvised by an actor) is hard to integrate in an otherwise lean, linear tragedy.
Across these productions, the treatment of the Porter ranges from cutting the scene and part completely (Godwin’s production, adapted by Emily Burns) to hiring Stewart Lee to write new topical material, including jibes at Boris Johnson and hedge-funders, for comedian Alison Peebles to perform at the RSC, or Jatinder Singh Randhawa improvising around the text at the Donmar, with jokes about Suella Braverman and a dispute with an usher attempting to remove him from the auditorium.
The problem of Act 3, Scene 5, Line 26
The ingredients the witches throw into their cauldron include “liver of blaspheming Jew”. Long problematic – the RSC version, which opened in August, removed it as part of a longer six-line reduction in the witches’ brew – it became even more so after the conflict resulting from the 7 October massacre of Israelis by Palestinian Hamas. At the Globe, a Witch pointed to a junior viewer and said “liver of a child like you”. In the ETT, Fiennes and Tennant versions, the ingredient was cut.
Which Macbeth is king?
Each speaking the verse impeccably, the two superstars in the part offer contrasting masterclasses in classical acting – Fiennes demonstrative and sonorous, Tennant allowed by the close mics that feed our headphones to internalise the character’s crisis, whispering some lines. At the RSC, Joseph was also notable for verbal power while the Globe’s Bennett justified the bold (and topical) choice to make the thane a man who knows from the beginning he is unsuited to power, while, for ETT, Noble skewered the cocky comedy that scars real-life politics.
But it is the last of the five to open that takes the crown. Matinees of the sold out Tennant-Jumbo production end at 4.30pm. At that time, people were already queuing, on a freezing December afternoon, for returns for the evening show.
• This article was amended on 22 December 2023. There have been five, not four, Conservative prime ministers in the past eight years.
