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On Saturday, in celebration of ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
breadandroses last final exam ever, we took the shiny new cheap bus up to NYC. We brunched in Brooklyn with breadandroses's college friend A and her husband. The husband is as charming and conversationally engaging as the wife, though from his name I had expected someone large, blond, and dourly Scandinavian, who might sit in a corner carving a longboat and occasionally grunting.
After zucchini-watercress soup, porcini-and-cremini-mushroom-quiche, mimosas, strawberries with yogurt cheese, and tea, we hopped on the subway and headed back to Manhattan to see (sit down, please, the management is not responsible for injuries incurred in envy-induced collapses) Patrick F**ing Stewart in Macbeth.
Unfortunately we had to wait a while for a subway, and then our train had to hold at a few stations, so we got to 42nd Street with only minutes to spare. We ran the several blocks to the theater, thrust our tickets at an usher, then pounded up, up, up, up an oval stair and through into the back of the upper balcony just in time to hear, over the whine of a heart monitor and the rattle of machinegun fire, "When shall we three meet again?"
The fixed set is a windowless white-tiled room with a grille-fronted freight elevator at the back, a functional sink downstage right, and a television-topped cabinet upstage left. Sometimes it serves as a hospital, sometimes a morgue, sometimes the kitchen or hall of a castle. Sometimes moveable set pieces, lighting, and actors create wholly other settings, as when almost the entire cast assembles to create a busy, crowded railway car where the murderers set upon Banquo and Fleance. Projected video created Birnam Wood and also gave an impression, through newsreel-type footage, of the wider kingdom affected by Macbeth's machinations.
The overall aesthetic is Stalinist - the men in red-trimmed olive uniforms or dark suits, Lady Macbeth in jewel-toned 1940s dresses, the witches as hospital nurses with white wimple-esque coifs.
A great many of the Shakespeare productions I've seen fall, at least in places, into a trap of people-standing-around-talking-and-emoting-beautifully. This production was very firmly grounded in the physical, not just in blood and water and steel, but in food. Act I, Scene 7, ("If it were done when 'tis done" and "I have given suck...", the scene with Lady Macbeth convincing him to screw his courage to the sticking place) is staged around wine-opening and cake-preparation, homely tasks that make the horror of what they're discussing even more chilling. When Macbeth is interviewing the two murderers, he's making and eating a sandwich, and when they have committed themselves to the enterprise he makes a second one and divides it between them.
Patrick Stewart is, to absolutely no one's surprise, extremely brilliant. One thing he does better than anyone I've ever seen is what a high school teacher of mine called "coining" - seeming to be finding the words, discovering the words, in the moment. It sounds goofy but it's amazing as a technique to revive lines that have lost their sense (to an audience) through familiarity. It's also, of course, wickedly difficult.
He's physically virtuosic. Conveying panicky fear in stillness in the theater - I don't know how he did it, but he did, and to the back of the balcony. There were moments of theatricality - a howl in the word "howl" - and also naturalism - talking to the murderers with his mouth full - and it all worked as a whole.
I was very struck by two unusual choices in the last act. First, to bring on Lady Macbeth's body (on a gurney, en route to the elevator) so Macbeth could do the "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow" speech with her body there, and to yank the drape back over her head and push the gurney away on "signifying nothing." Finally, to break Macbeth's last line so that "Damned be he that first cries hold" and "enough" are completely different thoughts. Macbeth is quite easily, almost casually, holding off Macduff until the "from my mother's womb untimely ripped" revelation, and after "damned be he" he struggles desperately, but then the witches reappear, and he gives himself up to his fate with "enough."
Oh! And Banquo's ghost. During the dinner party, ominous music begins, and swirls of red (projected video) curl out from the elevator at the back of the stage, until the car comes down and Banquo strides out and straight up onto the table. Macbeth screams and falls out of his chair to cower on the floor. Light out; intermission. After intermission, the dinner party begins again, but this time there is no Banquo, only Macbeth's terrified response.
In short, WORLD OF AWESOME.
breadandroses last final exam ever, we took the shiny new cheap bus up to NYC. We brunched in Brooklyn with breadandroses's college friend A and her husband. The husband is as charming and conversationally engaging as the wife, though from his name I had expected someone large, blond, and dourly Scandinavian, who might sit in a corner carving a longboat and occasionally grunting.After zucchini-watercress soup, porcini-and-cremini-mushroom-quiche, mimosas, strawberries with yogurt cheese, and tea, we hopped on the subway and headed back to Manhattan to see (sit down, please, the management is not responsible for injuries incurred in envy-induced collapses) Patrick F**ing Stewart in Macbeth.
Unfortunately we had to wait a while for a subway, and then our train had to hold at a few stations, so we got to 42nd Street with only minutes to spare. We ran the several blocks to the theater, thrust our tickets at an usher, then pounded up, up, up, up an oval stair and through into the back of the upper balcony just in time to hear, over the whine of a heart monitor and the rattle of machinegun fire, "When shall we three meet again?"
The fixed set is a windowless white-tiled room with a grille-fronted freight elevator at the back, a functional sink downstage right, and a television-topped cabinet upstage left. Sometimes it serves as a hospital, sometimes a morgue, sometimes the kitchen or hall of a castle. Sometimes moveable set pieces, lighting, and actors create wholly other settings, as when almost the entire cast assembles to create a busy, crowded railway car where the murderers set upon Banquo and Fleance. Projected video created Birnam Wood and also gave an impression, through newsreel-type footage, of the wider kingdom affected by Macbeth's machinations.
The overall aesthetic is Stalinist - the men in red-trimmed olive uniforms or dark suits, Lady Macbeth in jewel-toned 1940s dresses, the witches as hospital nurses with white wimple-esque coifs.
A great many of the Shakespeare productions I've seen fall, at least in places, into a trap of people-standing-around-talking-and-emoting-beautifully. This production was very firmly grounded in the physical, not just in blood and water and steel, but in food. Act I, Scene 7, ("If it were done when 'tis done" and "I have given suck...", the scene with Lady Macbeth convincing him to screw his courage to the sticking place) is staged around wine-opening and cake-preparation, homely tasks that make the horror of what they're discussing even more chilling. When Macbeth is interviewing the two murderers, he's making and eating a sandwich, and when they have committed themselves to the enterprise he makes a second one and divides it between them.
Patrick Stewart is, to absolutely no one's surprise, extremely brilliant. One thing he does better than anyone I've ever seen is what a high school teacher of mine called "coining" - seeming to be finding the words, discovering the words, in the moment. It sounds goofy but it's amazing as a technique to revive lines that have lost their sense (to an audience) through familiarity. It's also, of course, wickedly difficult.
He's physically virtuosic. Conveying panicky fear in stillness in the theater - I don't know how he did it, but he did, and to the back of the balcony. There were moments of theatricality - a howl in the word "howl" - and also naturalism - talking to the murderers with his mouth full - and it all worked as a whole.
I was very struck by two unusual choices in the last act. First, to bring on Lady Macbeth's body (on a gurney, en route to the elevator) so Macbeth could do the "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow" speech with her body there, and to yank the drape back over her head and push the gurney away on "signifying nothing." Finally, to break Macbeth's last line so that "Damned be he that first cries hold" and "enough" are completely different thoughts. Macbeth is quite easily, almost casually, holding off Macduff until the "from my mother's womb untimely ripped" revelation, and after "damned be he" he struggles desperately, but then the witches reappear, and he gives himself up to his fate with "enough."
Oh! And Banquo's ghost. During the dinner party, ominous music begins, and swirls of red (projected video) curl out from the elevator at the back of the stage, until the car comes down and Banquo strides out and straight up onto the table. Macbeth screams and falls out of his chair to cower on the floor. Light out; intermission. After intermission, the dinner party begins again, but this time there is no Banquo, only Macbeth's terrified response.
In short, WORLD OF AWESOME.
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I'm going to have to coax the tv to life so I can watch the Tony awards!
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When I lived in L.A., I got to see a good bit of P.S. live -- and yep, that coining thing is what I always remember ... as if he really is just now living those words that he's said 6,000 times or so. And the physicality. Dude!
I can so imagine the sandwich-eating, etc. You have a great gift for describing what you've seen. Heh; you some kind of writer, or something?
::longs for civilization::
Thanks for the report!
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I'm so glad you enjoyed reading it! I will post the recipe for the soup... it will be excellent for late summer, When Zucchini Attack.