Macbeth and His Problems

shakna

Performances at my local theatre are banned. The crowd loved the short five-night run, last time. It made all the papers, tickets sold out, tourists rocked up for it. Seven actors were injured, in a space that usually saw one injury a year. Six were ruled unavoidable by the fire warden doing the post-assessments.

farialima

Thank you for this article. What a refreshment from so many articles about AI… What’s important and complex in Shakespeare plays, is not what it’s written, but what’s left to the interpretation of the director, or even of the public — the ambiguities, the imperfections, that let us imagine the motivations of the characters (as the article points - the motives are clear but not the motivations), and let us perceive their emotions, feel their reactions, mixed with ours. Exactly what generative AI doesn't let you do.

zero_shift

This unearths some thoughts, back from my English degree twenty years ago But basically I don't think those problems are all meant to be solved Yes, the supernatural events described on stage are very difficult to pull off even with modern effects. But they were impossible with Jacobean setups. And that's kind of the point There is always a tension between what is seen and spoken in that play. We're meant to get the sense that Macbeth is partly talking himself into his frenzy Supernatural events happen but they kind of have a bathetic, eye-rolling quality to them, like the prophecy that "Great Birnam Wood to high Dunsinane Hill / Shall come against him" Which YEAH, it does, in that Macbeth's enemies construct a bunch of battering rams from the forest timber. You are supposed to groan at that. Magic is way weaker than any of the human beings and their ordinary vices

blipvert

TL;DR - he has 99 problems, but a witch ain’t one. I’ll see myself out.

Syzygies

One of the high points of my acting career (such as it was, second only to doing a scene with Russell Crowe as math consultant to A Beautiful Mind) was MacBeth. While Avatar actor Stephen Lang was still in college, he played MacBeth. I brought him news that Birnam Wood had moved, and he drew inspiration from every fiber of my being to deliver his "tale told by an idiot" spiel. I can still feel the spit hitting my face!