After seeing TR Warszawa’s much-anticipated interpretation of Macbeth and the National Theatre of Scotland’s interpretation of The Bacchae within a week of each other, I have one thing to say: No more severed heads on stage. Seriously, it never works. Please stop.
Ok, I guess I have a few other things to say too: What’s up with all the blood and guts classics on stage right now? I know we’re in the middle of a bloody time (is there any other kind?), but what do these plays have to say to us except to perpetuate the hopelessness of the barbaric nature of humanity? Sure, classic plays have a lot of draw – the rights are free, they seem to make you legitimate as a director/company/actor/whatever, and often audiences are afraid to disparage them, for fear of being marked as Philistines – but these tales of Boy-Meets-Sword are wearing thin.
I was especially disappointed in the National Theater of Scotland, as their Black Watch last season told a much more complex, unglorified, un-gore-ified story of pride, war and violence. Which brings me back to the severed heads. If you ARE going to deal with violence and death on stage, why take such a cop out and put that plastic prop (which isn’t fooling anyone, no matter how realistic it is, and no matter how far away your audience)? Why not use some real theatricality to create a greater impact of the cruelty of murder instead of turning the whole thing into a joke?
Why not anticipate the need for a prop at the end, and give Macbeth and Pentheus (the murdered prince in The Bacchae) each some defining prop throughout the play, which can then return to the stage bloodied without the laugh factor? (Moreover, in The Bacchae, why not have the same actor who plays Pentheus return as his mad, murderous mother Agave, displaying the messy triumph of wild nature over ordered civilization with a smaller dose of sexism than the play calls for?) I mean, I understand that back in the day, Macbeth was basically an action movie and The Bacchae was a Tarantino film, but since the movies cover that stuff nowadays, is it too much to ask for more from our theater?
Ha! I love it.
Mom and I have been watching Slings and Arrows on DVD, and the second season has some great interpretative things to say about Macbeth, in my uneducated (as in, I haven’t taken that class yet) opinion, as you may recall from the bits we saw during our threefold-cold this past January. but even Jeffrey doesn’t have the sense to lose the severed head. And it reads as completely ridiculous; you’re right. But you know that.
They do something really interesting early in the season when they need a way to show the (TV) show’s viewing audience the Macbeth story: they have a local grade school perform their interpretation of it, losing the Shakespearean text. The gore-iffic nature is driven home pretty quickly when it’s performed sans poetry by, like, 8-year-olds. You should check it out.
I love Slings and Arrows! Though the fact that they have a real ghost to play Banquo isn’t exactly something one could replicate on stage… or is it?
It’s too bad that Jeffrey keeps the fake head prop though. Usually he has such brilliant ideas – or I should say, those writing his lines do.
I know. I thought “his” decision to lose the ghost entirely (before Oliver stepped in) was total genius. Way more freaky, just as he intended. And then it climaxed into that ridiculous fake head, and I was like, “Seriously, Jeffrey/ people writing Jeffrey? How did we miss this one?”
I heard from a friend who saw the production that the recent version at BAM (which starred Patrick Stewart and has, I believe, made the leap to Broadway) had two stagings of the Banquo ghost scene. The first, before intermission, included an actor playing Banquo, and the second, after intermission was a repeat without a visible Banquo. When my friend told me that, I had to wonder if there was any link to Slings and Arrows. Either way, I think it’s a great idea.