Hugo Weaving as Macbeth in the Sydney Theatre Company production, July 2014 (all photos by Brett Boardman) |
By Elissa Blake
Hugo Weaving
emerges from the Macbeth rehearsal
room wearing black jeans, black work boots and a black T-shirt that is wet
around the neck and chest with … something.
“I’ve been
doused!” he announces, stretching the shirt away from his body. “I’m a bit wet.
Don’t worry, it is only water… for now.”
“There will be
blood,” adds director Kip Williams.
Weaving, 54, and
Williams, 28, are working together to create a radical new production of Macbeth for the Sydney Theatre Company.
Sitting on two big, squashy couches on an enclosed balcony overlooking the
harbour, the young director and the charismatic stage and film star, take their
time talking about their mountainous project. Williams is very softly spoken.
Weaving leans in to listen carefully.
The idea Williams
outlines is mind-bending and, from a box office perspective, financially
counter-intuitive.
“I have this image
of an empty theatre,” Williams says. “Macbeth as a lone figure, standing among
900 empty seats. That emptiness speaks to the core of his tragedy and the type
of isolation he feels. The
production will be quite naked, just eight actors in a space telling this
story. The audience will have the story exist primarily in their imaginations.
We are asking them to do a lot of imaginative work.”
“After all,
Macbeth himself does a lot of imaginative work,” Weaving adds. “It’s one of his
big problems that he can’t contain this fearful, feverish imagination that he
has. So in a way, it’s great that you’re allowing the audience to work in the
same way.”
In Williams’s
production, Shakespeare’s bloody tragedy will be rendered as an intimate
spectacle by turning the theatre back to front. Instead of sitting comfortably
in the 900 plush seats of the Sydney Theatre, a much smaller audience of
360 will be in raked seating on the stage. The actors will perform right in
front of them, as well as in the cavernous auditorium among those empty seats.
The audience will be directly facing the seats looking out at the view normally
only seen by the actors. But there will no sea of faces staring back at them.
The theatre will be eerily empty.
“That empty
stillness in a theatre can be quite spooky,” says Weaving. “When I first saw
the set model, I got this … feeling.” Weaving stops mid-sentence and makes his
whole torso shudder, as if he has chills.
“It’s a feeling of
great excitement,” Weaving says. “None of us really know how this is going to
work. The audience will come in thinking, ‘this isn’t theatre as I know it, so
what is it?’ It puts everyone in a less knowing, more open environment and
that’s really liberating.”
Eden Falk as Fleance and Paula Arundell as Banquo. |
Hugo Weaving on stage alone. Design by Alice Babidge. |
The idea for the
unusual staging occured when Williams was assisting STC artistic director
Andrew Upton on his production of The White Guard at the Sydney Theatre in 2011. It was Williams’s first gig with
the STC, aged 25.
“Andrew and I were
walking around the stage and looking out at the theatre,” Williams recalls. “We
started a conversation about what it would be like to place the audience on the
stage and that conversation pretty quickly moved into discussions about the
Scottish play. It was the first play we thought of.
“It’s pretty
unusual. Usually the play comes first and the design second. But in this case,
the space itself conjured up the play. Something to do with the ghostly
haunting image of looking out into those empty seats evoked Macbeth himself.”
There is something
inherently unsettling in those 900 seats staring back at you, says Williams.
“You have at once a sense of the structure of a society before you and you have
the ghosts of all those audiences past. It creates a kind of haunting
pressure.”
Weaving with Melita Jurisic as Lady Macbeth. |
Upton suggested
the play to Weaving, who had recently thrilled audiences in Uncle Vanya, Les Liaisons Dangereuses
and Waiting for Godot. Weaving, who
has never played Macbeth before, jumped at the chance.
“I’ve always been
fascinated by the play,” Weaving says. “I’ve been reading the script a million
times, I can never stop doing that. I’m thinking increasingly that you can’t
pin Macbeth down. He’s not one thing. He is as complex as we all are and more so. He is as complex and
contradictory as life. So I’m increasingly expanding my sense of where you can
go with the role. It’s great, but also terrifying.”
Williams, who is
co-resident director at the STC (alongside Sarah Goodes whose production of The Effect will play at the same time as
Macbeth), made an impact on audiences
and critics alike with his productions of Under Milk Wood (2012) and Romeo and Juliet (2013).
“I have admired
Hugo’s work for a long time, so it’s extraordinary to be working with a person
that you’ve admired,” Williams says. “But I’m particularly thrilled to have
Hugo in this role because it takes a very special presence and a very special
charisma for an audience to ride with a character into the depths.”
From left, clockwise: Kate Box, Paula Arundell, Rovert Meznies, Eden Falk and John Gaden. |
Williams says he
wants to challenge the traditional idea of Macbeth as a morality play. “By the
end of Act IV, Macbeth is usually seen as a monster, a villain. He’s depicted
as someone who is not us,”
Williams explains. “As an audience, we are let off the hook. His
self-destruction is depicted in a way where you can say that’s happening to
someone who is not me. The great challenge for Hugo, who will be on stage for
the entire play, is to find a way to make Macbeth someone the audience
identifies with and then think, ‘I could be capable of doing these things’. It
takes an actor of great heart to be able to lead an audience to a cliff face
and get them to jump off. Hugo is one of those actors.”
Weaving once said
he thought he was too young to tackle Godot,
but he believes he is the perfect age for Macbeth. “I think with the great
writing, the older you are the better you get at it because your life
experience is such that you have a greater comprehension of what’s contained in
a particular idea,” Weaving says.
“Macbeth has this
great, active virility to him, a physical nature. But at the same time he’s got
to have a sense of his life becoming like a yellow leaf. Things are getting
tedious. All the days feel the same to him.”
Arundell as Lady MacDuff and Weaving. |
Weaving says
Macbeth fears his sense of self is something quite constructed. “His sense of
self crumbles away as the play progresses. It becomes a journey into a
disordered mind and a disordered world. That’s something I can relate to,” he
says. “As I get older, all sorts of things I thought were true and I thought I
understood well, I don’t anymore. My sense of what defines who I am… I don’t
know. I just get more and more confused. So from that perspective the journey
is quite confronting.”
Williams says the
production is not set in any particular time or place, and that Alice Babidge’s
design will rely on minimal costuming and props. The text itself has not been
significantly cut or changed beyond having actors play multiple roles.
Weaving says he admires
Williams’s ability to be prepared and then “chuck it all out”.
“The first thing I
saw Kip do was Under Milk Wood,”
Weaving recalls. “There are a lot of similarities with this production. [In Milk Wood], I got a strong sense people
in space telling a story, creating a world physically with objects and
themselves. I got a very strong sense of that community and environment and my
imagination was working in a really great way. As a consequence, I loved that
production. It feels like we’re working in a similar way on Macbeth.”
When asked if he
feels any pressure taking on the role of Macbeth, he pauses to think. “I know
the audience expectations will be massive,” Weaving says. “But I don’t feel an
inordinate sense of having to carry anything, no. It will feel like an ensemble
piece. Even if you’re psychologically focusing on the journey of this man, in
terms of the doing of it, it will feel like we’re all on stage doing it
together telling a story.”
He says it’s
important for actors not to get lost in themselves. “You are telling a story.
It’s not about [itals] you [itals],”
he says. “But you need to allow things to come out that you haven’t planned. So
you need to be in a situation where you’re not particularly in control or you
are vulnerable. That is something I love about acting. But it’s also the very
thing that terrifies me. And that’s one of the things that terrifies Macbeth.”
Macbeth opens at
the Sydney Theatre on July 25, 2014.
Orson Welles as Macbeth in 1948. |
Widely studied at
high school, regularly performed and adapted into film versions several times
(by Orson Welles, Akira Kurosawa and Roman Polanski, and by Australia’s Geoffrey
Wright and Justin Kurzel), Macbeth is
Shakespeare’s best-known tragedy. That level of familiarity has allowed
theatremakers to look beyond the simple duties of storytelling. While
recognisable, some staged versions of Macbeth
have been very strange indeed.
Who could forget
the sight of British actor Stephen Dillane murdering himself in his one-man Macbeth (A Modern Ecstasy), which, after
garnering reviews ranging from bemused to hostile in Los Angeles and London,
played at the Sydney Theatre in 2006. Accompanied by an ambient jazz trio,
Dillane played 30 or more characters, many of them indistinguishable. “A bloody awful production” fumed critic Charles Spencer
in London’s Telegraph. “In short,
this solo Macbeth isn't just garbage –
it’s arrogantly elitist garbage that makes Shakespeare seem at once absurd and
inaccessible.” Sydney theatergoers, many of whom crept out during the show,
could only agree.
In a recent and
rather better reviewed one-man version directed by English director John Tiffany, actor Alan
Cumming, performing in Glasgow, drew rave notices for a Macbeth as experienced
in the mind of a patient in an insane asylum.
“Presented like this,” wrote the Guardian’s reviewer, “ . . . characters become
shards of a single fragmented personality, a man plagued by the projections of
his own mind.”
In 2003, the British
theatre company Punchdrunk created an award-winning immersive, site-specific
rendering of Macbeth titled Sleep No More, in which the cast perform
wordless
interpretive scenes from the play to an audience compelled to wear masks and
remain silent at all times. In another immersive Macbeth that has recently opened in London, the audience spends 12
hours with the story as it unfolds in the rooms, corridors, car parks and
basements of a soon-to-be-renovated tower block in the city’s East End.
Many productions
have removed the Macbeth story from Dark Ages Scotland. Orson Welles created
the “Voodoo Macbeth” in 1936, which transported the action to a
witchcraft-stricken, nineteenth century Haiti. South African playwright Welcome
Msoni translated Macbeth into the
Zulu uMabatha in 1970 and the Shogun Macbeth, set in 13th century
Japan, earned rave reviews on its debut in New York in 1986.
There are comic Macbeths, too. Poo, bum and wee jokes flew
thick and fast in Bell Shakespeare’s production of author Andy Griffiths’s Just Macbeth! in
which the characters of his much-loved Just
series, Andy, Lisa and Danny, made a witch’s brew from eye of newt, dog spit
and Whizz Fizz and found themselves transported to ancient Scotland.
Sydney audiences have also been
treated to the multi-skilled Canadian performer Rick Miller’s solo MacHomer, in which Homer
and Marge Simpson are Lord and Lady Macbeth, neighbour Ned Flanders is Banquo,
and nuclear plant owner Montgomery Burns is Duncan. “Have we eaten on the
insane root / That takes the reason prisoner?” asked Flanders/Banquo. “Mmmmm
...” drooled MacHomer, momentarily distracted from his dreams of ultimate power.
“Insaaaaane root ...” EB
This story was first published in The Sydney Morning Herald on July 14, 2014.
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