Tuning in to Radio Macbeth

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by Allan Appel | Jun 22, 2007 12:14 pm

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Posted to: Arts

RadioMacbeth_001%5B1%5D.jpg There are enough plays whose subject is the making of plays (Michael Frayne’s Noises Off, Wallace Shawn’s Vanya on 42nd Street, and Kiss Me, Kate come immediately to mind), that it might almost be a candidate for a genre in its own right. Radio Macbeth, acclaimed director Anne Bogart and her SITI Company’s adaptation to a 1940s radio recording studio of the 1607 Will Shakespeare original, is an arresting and stylish addition. With only three performances left, there is no tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow to see it, so if you act, ‘twere better to act quickly, as Macbeth does; it’s a wise, even thrilling, Arts & Ideas offering.

From the instant that actors Will Bond (who plays Duncan, Macduff, a murderer, and the doctor) and Ellen Lauren as Lady Macbeth, along with the rest of their company stumble onto the stage in near darkness, you know that this tragedy is going to be accompanied, yes, by comedy. How will this be possible?

Punctuated by giggles, furniture being kicked, the slap of a notebook on a table, and long intervals of pregnant silence, while the actor who turns out to be King Duncan searches for the light switch, you know that this production is “listening” to the sounds it makes. Then when the actors begin their run through and utilize the large old-fashioned microphones, for example, to magnify the soliloquies—a fascinating irony because the soliloquy is supposed to be the still quiet voice, not the boomer in you—or to allow a single actor to modulate in and out of all three creepy witch voices, you know you’re in the presence of an adaptation that is not about novelty for laughs or for its own sake but one trolling for new depth in an old text.

macbeth%20003.JPG With big lapelled suits and fat-headed microphones, the production is far more than a reverential nod to Orson Wells’ Mercury Theater productions, on radio and on screen. There’s not a word spoken in the play that’s not Shakespeare’s own. Yet when, for example, Macbeth sees Banquo’s ghost and he is so beside himself he climbs up on the table in a conflicted swoon of fear versus impulse to confrontation. When that scene concludes and the actors modulate into the next, the Asian actor who plays Angus, Fleance, Lennox, Seyton, and Young Siward (whew, but it’s all staged seamlessly) and she hands Macbeth a cup of tea, so he can refresh himself before going on to hire the murderers, you have no problem with these two moments living side by side. You have been won over by the world of the play.

A tour de force moment is the knocking at the gate, the famous porter’s scene, after Duncan’s murder, is achieved. Here the actor slaps the table with a two-by-four what seems like a dozen times, each time more bone-shakingly haunting. And then when she does the difficult porter’s speech, part arrogant drunk, part terrified little man who thinks the devil is at the gate, but then asks for a tip as well, her fellow actors appear as gripped as the audience by the range of sound and emotion she has traversed.

“Knock, knock, knock,” she cries. And it is a knock out. The early 19th century English critic Joseph Addison wrote somewhere that the knocking at the gate in Macbeth was the most dramatic and profound moment he ever experienced in the theater; he remembered it from when he saw it as a small boy, and it directed him to a life as a writer. I never quite understood him until the SITI production.

In many ways sound is the star of this adaptation. Whether of the crashing two-by-four, or the brilliant use of breath blown across the microphone to create the sounds of a storm-tossed world in the wake of Duncan’s assassination, or the clacking and inventive use of a dozen folding chairs, which make them swords or the tyrant’s harness or the boughs of Birnam Wood approaching Dunsinane, we really hear this play as we see it, every creak, every hurly burly, every double double toil and trouble, and then every silence. Even the many looks of horror or disappointment or suspicion exchanged among the actors while in character, and then, when momentarily and briefly they transition out for tea or a food break and rush back, with food in their mouth and say, “Yes, milord,” . . . even these exchanges are “heard” in a kind of swoon of synesthesia.

And then, of course, there’s the text. Macbeth, of all Shakespeare plays is perhaps the most dense with language, with metaphor piled upon metaphor in some of the speeches that scholars don’t quite know what some of the passages mean, and yet it works. This great pleasure in language so poetic it is almost like an impasto on the air is wonderfully conveyed in this production, that also gives pleasure with beautiful articulation by the cast of a text where every other sentence is recognizable and quotable.

macbeth%20001.JPG No wonder that these students, Lucy Gillespie, in the foreground, and her friend Lilly Feinn and their pals were down in mass from their activities at the Eugene O’Neill Center in New London to check out the play. “We really wanted to see ‘Viewpoints’ in action,” said Gillespie, who is a student at Northwestern during the school year. Viewpoints is an approach to acting, pioneered by Anne Bogart, that maximizes sound and movement in the creation of theater.

And did they like the production? “Well,” Gillespie answered at the end of the hour and half production, “it was really wonderful the way big dramatic moments and entertaining ones were just melded effortlessly together. Oh yes, we really enjoyed it. Of course, she cut a lot of the play.”

And added material as well. There’s a long song for “fairies” in the third act which most scholars believe, by the style and its lack of dramatic usefulness, was not written by Shakespeare but by Thomas Middleton, a contemporary. Many directors cut it from production. But Anne Bogart included it, with the remarkable actor, Kelly Maurer (who plays the witches, porter, gentlewoman, and Lady MacDuff) doing this turn as well. Why?

I’m not at all certain about this choice. Perhaps the only way to figure it out is to tune into Radio Macbeth once again. Anon.

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