Only Colicos Excels In So-so 'Macbeth'

Two imposing pieces of work are on view in the production of Macbeth that John Houseman has directed for the American Shakespeare Festival. John Colicos, in the title role, provides the first. Jennifer Tipton is responsible for the second. No, she is not playing Lady Macbeth; she designed the lighting, which helps the show incalculably--but of this more anon.

Colicos' accomplishment is especially welcome, for it illustrates what can be done by long and dedicated hard work without any pronounced help from lady luck. In the early seasons of the Festival, Colicos was just one of the many actors doing yeoman service in small parts. From Lodovico in Othello, Gratiano in The Merchant of Venice, and Leonato in Much Ado About Nothing, Colicos was advanced to the important supporting roles of Laertes in Hamlet and Lysander in Midsummer Night's Dream. Then, in the final offering of the 1958 season, he was entrusted with the central role of The Winter's Tale. His Leontes was flawed, but it was a performance of great promise.

In the years since then he busied himself elsewhere in a wide variety of plays, both Shakespearean and other. He had made remarkable strides by the time I saw him do the difficult leading role of Brother Julian in Albee's Tiny Alice two summers ago in Philadelphia. This was a portrayal carried through with subtlety and skill, substantially superior to what Sir John Gielgud had been able to do with the part on Broadway. And now, after nine years, Colicos has returned to the Festival to tackle the tremendous title role of Macbeth and to traverse it triumphantly. His success is all the more marked when one looks back to the Festival's previous bout with this play, in which Pat Hingle's Macbeth proved to be a foghorned fiasco.

Textual Problems

An outside critic cannot tell exactly how much a director has contributed to a player's performance and how much is the player's own. The director must here be held accountable for the actual text that is used--and Macbeth presents an unusually high number of textual problems. There are no Macbeth quartos; we have only the version in the First Folio, published some dozen and a half years after the play was written, and even this is a corrupt text. Furthermore, no other Shakespeare play has more lines that are ambiguous in their meaning.

At any rate, Colicos Macbeth is considerably younger than usual, though not at all invalid for being so. This Macbeth is a man of extra-ordinary physical energy, and one can understand at once why he has been so heroic a general in the field. Colicos makes clear that Macbeth would never have fallen into a career of evil if he had not been forcefully pushed into it by his wife (in fact, the early reign of the historical Macbeth was admirable--one of several aspects of Holinshed's Chronicles that Shakespeare suppressed or changed). This is not to deny Macbeth's ambition. Sure, he wanted to be king. But he had every right to expect that he would be anyhow, for it must be remembered that in 11th-century Scotland the kingship was an elective office and that Duncan's public announcement making his son Malcolm the heir-apparent was actually illegal. When Macbeth and Banquo first hear the Witches prophecies, they laugh at them until the noblemen enter to prove the first prophecy true. Later, when Lady Macbeth is egging her husband on, Colicos not only says, "Prithee, peace," but also strikes her to the floor in anger. This man is no willing regicide. When he first meets King Duncan face to face, he kneels loyally and stays there until the king himself has to walk over and pull him up by the shoulders.

Imagination

Macbeth is also endowed with a hypersensitive imagination. Colicos constantly reacts in little ways to the strange sounds that abound around Inverness Castle (this production has a highly active off-stage soundtrack). The dagger soliloquy comes after he dozes off on a bench; he starts to hallucinate in a half-awake state, and seems hardly to be aware of his own real dagger, which he draws but then drops on the floor. When he goes upstairs to murder Duncan, he carries his dagger behind his back. On returning, he holds two bloody daggers in one hand--again behind his back, where he can't see them. This also makes more plausible the lengthy ensuing dialogue with his wife before She spots the daggers; and she finds that she has to pry them loose from his grip as though rigor mortis had set in. So traumatic has the experience been for him that she finally has to yank and drag him off to wash his bloody hands.

The handling of the banquet scene is superb. Shakespeare intended that someone impersonating a ghost should actually appear here twice; and it was always done this way from his day until Kemble's production of 1794. Nonetheless, it is wrong. And director Houseman was right to substitute a weak red spotlight instead (which has the added virtue of avoiding a decision as to whether one of the two appearances is the ghost of Duncan rather than of Banquo). The apparitions are hallucinatory and visible only to Macbeth. It makes no more sense to bring in a ghost visible to all the banqueters and to us than to lower a dagger on a string for the earlier soliloquy (and the true ghost appearances in Hamlet and Julius Caesar are in no wise analogous).

Violence

Macbeth sees the first apparition on a downstage stool. Lady Macbeth has to pick up the stool and smash it to the floor in order to snap him out of his hallucination. The second time, the apparition has moved to the upstage throne. Macbeth, tormented by this vision, sees only one care; in a furious and frightening burst of violence, he overthrows the tables between him and it, and hurls himself into the kingly seat--an act of inordinate courage. (This table-throwing works supremely well here, as it did not when Paul Scofield did the same thing in Peter Brook's King Lear.)

With guests scattered and Macbeth alone, Colicos comes downstage and puts a hand to his temple as though plagued by a fearsome migraine. The banquet hall darkens and is subjected to a continuously moving mottled light, whereupon we hear the Witches for the last time. This staging makes it seem that Macbeth's final encounter with the Witches is one more hallucination.

After Lady Macbeth's mind has cracked under the strain, Macbeth nearly throttles the Doctor for his inability to cure her. Gradually he becomes more and more disillusioned. When the last charm proves hollow and Macduff relates his Caesarean birth, Colicos does not yell his reply ("Accursed be that tongue that tells me so."), as usually done, but rather delivers it very effectively at a soft level.

Elicits Smiles

Finally, with his entire world crumbled about him and without the slightest glimmer of hope left, Macbeth still insists on summoning up his transcendent courage to meet his death with honor. Fine enough, but Houseman carries the idea too far, and the result elicits smiles. Shakespeare specified that Macduff was to kill Macbeth off stage and then enter with the tyrant's head. Instead, we see the entire duel. Macbeth even picks Macduff up and swings him on his shoulders. Macduff while up there pulls out a dagger and stabs Macbeth in the back. But Macbeth is too strong to go down, and several soldiers rush in to pile stabbing upon stabbing (an homage to Julius Caesar?). Despite all this mauling, Macbeth is able to stand up one more time before pitching towards the audience down a flight of stairs to his death. I fear this finale betrays Houseman's many years of Hollywood movie-making.

Colicos speaks clearly and resonantly throughout the play. Only when he pushes his fortissimo does he occasionally skirt unintelligibility. Of all Shakespeare's great tragic heroes, Macbeth most needs an actor as opposed to a reciter. Colicos meets this demand impressively. His movements are as convincing as his voice. And he says an unusual amount with his eyes, which happen to be exceptionally penetrating. At present Colicos falls short of an ideal Macbeth in only one respect: his performance lacks sufficient size. Very probably his portrayal will acquire the desired largeness as he continues to play the part in coming years. But as it is, of the fifteen or so Macbeths I have encountered, Colicos' ranks near the top.

I am somewhat at a loss to explain why Carrie Nye's Lady Macbeth is so unsatisfactory. In a half dozen roles--including major ones--during previous seasons of the Festival, she never turned in anything but a praise-worthy job. Miss Nye is young and beautiful--and Lady Macbeth may properly be the same. But Miss Nye is just not Lady Macbeth. For one thing, her vocal tempo is absurdly slow. She is constantly given to internal pauses, often between every two words of a sentence. As a result we hear each sound she makes (though "Out, damned spot!" requires four syllables, not three), but the sounds seldom add up to convincing discourse. She indulges in elocution rather than elucidation.

Unlike her husband, Lady Macbeth lacks imagination. But she does not lack will. Yet Miss Nye repeatedly lets her strong will go slack. Or take the small but vital moment that trips up so many actresses. Macbeth is reluctant to choose the path of murder and says, "If we should fail--," to which Lady Macbeth replies, "We fail"--two tiny words. The Folio punctuation is no clear guide here. The words admit three groups of interpretation, depending on whether they are regarded as being followed by a question mark, an exclamation point, or a period. Mrs. Siddons, history's most admired Lady Macbeth, tried all three and unwisely settled on the last. Miss Nye says, "We [pause] fail! [longer pause]/But screw your courage to the sticking-place,/And we'll not fail." Lady Macbeth is a better psychologist than this. She would not let her husband entertain the idea of failure in the first place; and she certainly would not let such an idea sink in by observing a lengthy silence afterward. She must put absolute incredulity into that pair of words and go right on to the next line--the word "but" being used in its meaning of "only."

In the wondrous sleepwalking scene, of which every phrase refers to some earlier line, Miss Nye does not get much below the surface. And we know from the Nurse that Lady Macbeth is so affected by the dread deeds she has done in darkness that she insists on having a light by her all the time. Miss Nye enters with a lamp, but she leaves it behind when she exits, whereas Lady Macbeth would never go back to her bed without her light. Miss Nye clearly needs to rethink the whole part from scratch.

Shakespeare concentrated most of his attention on the two principals. The rest of the cast are on the whole not really full-rounded in the text itself, but require extra effort by their players to make them so. There is room for a good deal more effort in the current production.

The historical Banquo was actually an accomplice in the murder of Duncan. In the play he was transmuted into a figure of unswerving loyalty and integrity, thus becoming a foil to the character of Macbeth. Here, as John Devlin plays him, he comes off rather colorless. Ernest Graves' Duncan, though gray-haired, is younger than usual--which is in keeping with Colicos' Macbeth, since the two are first cousins. John Cunningham's Malcolm is crisply spoken, but too priggish for my taste; I almost regret that he does gain the throne at the end.

Richard Mathews makes Ross surprisingly credible. His first entrance is on the run; and he kneels before King Duncan more out of exhaustion than deference. Only in the course of his lengthy report does he gain his breath, stand up, and gradually inject his words with increasing enthusiasm. Tom Aldredge's Macduff is properly honest and resolute. But when, before the climactic duel, he says, "I have no words;/My voice is in my sword," one wishes the statement were literally true, for his vocal delivery through-out the play is throaty and gargly.

Jerry Dodge's drunken Porter is a commendable cameo. And he gives an admirable solution to one textual problem. Just before Macduff and Lennox enter through the gate, the Porter has the line, "I pray you, remember the porter." A number of scholars claim this is meant as an aside to the audience--which seems pretty silly. Dodge, however, saves the line until Macduff enters, and then speaks it with one palm extended, thereby turning it into a request for a tip in return for having roused himself to open the gate at an ungodly hour.

As for the celebrated trio of witches, Houseman has taken up Margaret Webster's suggestion that "we should see as little as possible of the Witches in the flesh of actors or actresses." In all three of their scenes, their voices are broadcast in a strong whisper over loudspeakers. In the first and third, they are not visible at all; and in the second they are represented by vaguely moving black shapes scarcely perceptible on the almost totally dark stage. This approach serves to increase the impact of the Witches as pervasive and ubiquitous symbols of evil. Only one of the voices is that of a witch, however; the other two are those of war-locks, since Houseman uses men's voices.

Houseman must be censured for so freely using the blue pencil, thereby shortening the play to a running time of only two hours and ten minutes. Of course the two appearances of Hecate should be cut, since they are later interpolations--but this is a matter of only forty or fifty lines. Any further cutting is unwise. The text as we have it is, except for The Comedy of Errors, the shortest in the canon. It is hardly more than half as long as Hamlet. As it stands, it is tightly constructed. There are no sub-plots, and no excrescences. Everything deals with the prime matter at hand--even the drunken porter's scene has a far more important function than that of mere comic relief. The dramatist compressed some seventeen years into the space of a few months. More than any of the other tragedies, Macbeth moves unswervingly and swiftly, without unnecessary padding, from start to finish; and any cut removes something valuable. Yet Houseman has removed sizable chunks (including the incredibly fabulous cauldron recipe of the Witches), and even transplanted a portion of Act II into Act IV. Lay off, Houseman--hold, enough!

As I said earlier, since there is only one source for the text, and that a corrupt one, Macbeth has provided a field day for textual emendators. In Macbeth's famous remark, "My way of life/Is fall'n into the sere, the yellow leaf," Houseman has adopted Dr. Johnson's emendation of "May" for "way." In the same speech, the Folio offers, "This push/Will cheere me ever, or dis-eate me now." Among the conjectures are "disease," "disseize," "defeat," and "dis-ease." I myself like to understand "chair" (which was pronounced "cheer" then), with which "disseat" makes perfect sense. Houseman too settles on "chair" but follows it up with "unseat," which is obviously not acceptable. But let me spare you this ped-antic nit-picking, if you are still with me at all.

The most startling reading in the production follows the report that Lady Macbeth is dead. In the text Macbeth proceeds: "She should have died hereafter:/There would have been a time for such a word./Tomorrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow," etc. But Houseman has Colicos say, "There would have been a time for such a word tomorrow," [long pause]... and tomorrow," etc. This surprising enjambement is at the very opposite extreme from what Jason Robards did in the 1959 production here, when he exited and returned with the dead Lady Macbeth in his arms before proceeding with his speech. This play inspires variety like few others.

As I indicated at the outset, Jennifer Tipton's lighting is first-class, and contributes more to the production than does any of the players besides Colicos. On the whole her lighting is less murky than one normally gets. And she rightly employs a warm, mellow glow only once--for Duncan's arrival at Inverness Castle. She makes some use of a follow-spot, but it is never obtrusive in musical-comedy fashion. Many of her effects would be impossible without the marvelous unit set designed by Rouben Ter-Arutunian--two converging cavernous walls of shiny but unsmooth silver, parts of which can swing in; and, hovering overhead, a structure suggestive of some enormous gray mythic bat, through whose wings lights sometimes filter. Ter-Arutunian also designed the costumes, which belong to no one period. For the most part they are of gray and black, though Macbeth and his wife are symbolically garbed in blood-red on their first entrance as king and queen. There is rather too much of John Duffy's dissonant and ominous background music, for which Houseman's Hollywood career is again perhaps responsible.

The most important thing about this production is that it firmly establishes John Colicos' position as a classical actor of major stature. This by itself is no small achievement