“Instead, I’m going to invite you to take a hard look at this play and then get on with it. It’s short and it’s faulty. That is to say, it’s full of errors that crept into whatever script was handed to the printers. Shakespeare didn’t write the silly Hecate bits so out she comes. It’s compact and drives quickly to its end. It’s remorseless. I’ve directed it, in other theatres, twice — each time, I may say, successfully and without any signs of bad luck — so I don’t believe in the bad-luck stories associated with it and I hope none of you do either. Or if you do, you’ll keep your ideas to yourselves. ”
He paused long enough to sense a change of awareness in his audience and a quick, instantly repressed, movement of Nina Gaythorne’s hands.
“It’s straightforward,” he said. “I don’t find any major difficulties or contradictions in Macbeth. He is a hypersensitive, morbidly imaginative man beset by an overwhelming ambition. From the moment he commits the murder he starts to disintegrate. Every poetic thought, magnificently expressed, turns sour. His wife knows him better than he knows himself and from the beginning realizes that she must bear the burden, reassure her husband, screw his courage to the sticking-place, jolly him along. In my opinion,” Peregrine said, looking directly at Margaret Mannering, “she’s not an iron monster who can stand up to any amount of hard usage. On the contrary, she’s a sensitive creature who has an iron will and has made a deliberate, evil choice. In the end she never breaks, but she talks and walks in her sleep. Disastrously.”
Maggie leaned forward, her hands clasped, her eyes brilliantly fixed on his face. She gave him a little series of nods. At the moment, at least, she believed him.
“And she’s as sexy as hell,” he added. “She uses it. Up to the hilt.”
He went on. The witches, he said, must be completely accepted. The play was written in James the First’s time at his request. James the First believed in witches. In their power and their malignancy. “Let us show you,” said Peregrine, “what I mean. Jeremy, can you?”
Blackout, and there were the drawings, needle-sharp in the focused lights.
“You see the first one,” Peregrine said. “That’s what we’ll go up on, my dears. A gallows with its victim, picked clean by the witches. They’ll drop down from it and dance clumsy widdershins around it. Thunder and lightning. Caterwauls. The lot. Only a few seconds and then they’ll leap up and we’ll see them in midair. Blackout. They’ll fall behind the high rostrum onto a pile of mattresses. Gallows away. Pipers. Lighted torches and we’re off.”
Well, he thought, I’ve got them. For the moment. They’re caught. And that’s all one can hope for. He went through the rest of the cast, noting how economically the play was written and how completely the inherent difficulty of holding the interest in a character as seemingly weak as Macbeth was overcome.
“Weak?” asked Dougal Macdougal. “You think him weak, do you?”
“Weak, in respect of this one monstrous thing he feels himself drawn toward doing. He’s a most successful soldier. You may say ‘larger than life.’ He takes the stage, cuts a superb figure. The King has promised he will continue to shower favors upon him. Everything is as rosy as can be. And yet — and yet —”
“His wife?” Dougal suggested. “And the witches!”
“Yes. That’s why I say the witches are enormously important. One has the feeling that they are conjured up by Macbeth’s secret thoughts. There’s not a character in the play that questions their authority. There have been productions, you know, that bring them on at different points, silent but menacing, watching their work.
“They pull Macbeth along the path to that one definitive action. And then, having killed the King, he’s left — a Murderer. Forever. Unable to change. His morbid imagination takes charge. The only thing he can think of is to kill again. And again. Notice the imagery. The play closes in on him. And on us. Everything thickens. His clothes are too big, too heavy. He’s a man in a nightmare.
“There’s the break, the breather for the leading actor, that comes in all the tragedies. We see Macbeth once again with the witches and then comes the English scene with the boy Malcolm taking his oddly contorted way of finding out if Macduff is to be trusted, his subsequent advance into Scotland, the scene of Lady Macbeth speaking of horrors with the strange, dead voice of the sleepwalker.
“And then we see him again; greatly changed; aged, desperate, unkempt; his cumbersome royal robes in disarray, always attended by Seyton, who had grown in size. And so to the end.”
He waited for a moment. Nobody spoke.
“I would like,” said Peregrine, “before we block the opening scenes, to say a brief word about the secondary parts. It’s the fashion to say they’re uninteresting. I don’t agree. About Lennox, in particular. He’s likable, down to earth, quick-witted but slow to make the final break. There’s evidence in the imperfect script of some doubt about who says what. We will make Lennox the messenger to Lady Macduff. When next we see him he’s marching with Malcolm. His scene with an unnamed thane (we’ll give the lines to Ross), when their suspicion of Macbeth, their nosing out of each other’s attitudes, develops into a tacit understanding, is ‘modern’ in treatment, almost black comedy in tone.”
“And the Seyton?” asked a voice from the rear. A very deep voice.
“Ah, Seyton. Obviously, he’s ‘Sirrah,’ the unnamed servant who accompanies Macbeth like a shadow, who carries his great claymore, who joins the two murderers and later in the play emerges with a name — Seyton. He has hardly any lines but he’s ominous. A big, silent, ever-present amoral fellow who only leaves his master at the end. The very end. We’re casting Gaston Sears for the part. Mr. Sears, as you all know, in addition to being an actor is an authority on medieval arms and is already working for us in that capacity.” There was an awkward silence followed by an acquiescent murmur.
The saturnine person, sitting alone, cleared his throat, folded his arms, and spoke. “I shall carry,” he announced, basso-profundo, “a claidheamh-mor.”
“Quite so,” said Peregrine. “You are the sword-bearer. As for the —”
“— which has been vulgarized into ‘claymore.’ I prefer ‘claidheamh-mor,’ meaning ‘great sword’; it being—”
“Quite so, Gaston. And now —”
For a time the voices mingled, the bass one coming through with disjointed phrases: “… Magnus’s leg-biter… quillons formed by turbulent protuberances…”
“To continue!” Peregrine shouted. The sword-bearer fell silent.
“And the witches?” asked a helpful witch.
“Entirely evil,” answered the relieved Peregrine. “Dressed like fantastic parodies of Meg Merrilies but with terrible faces. We don’t see their faces until look not like th’ inhabitants o’ the earth, and yet are on’t, when they are suddenly revealed.”
“And speak?”
“Braid Scots.”
“What about me, Perry? Braid Scots, too?” suggested the Porter.
“Yes. You enter through the central trap, having been collecting fuel in the basement. And,” Peregrine said with ill-concealed pride, “the fuel is bleached driftwood and most improperly shaped. You address each piece in turn as a farmer, as an equivocator, and as an English tailor, and you consign them all to the fire.”
“I’m a funny man?”