![]() ![]() No one else should ever be allowed to televise Shakespeare…There is so much I was proud of: discovering how to play a soliloquy direct into the eyes of everyone in the audience making them laugh at Macbeth’s gallows humor working alongside Judi Dench’s finest performance. Trevor had used a similar technique with Antony and Cleopatra on the box. The claustrophobia of the stage production was exactly captured. McKellen recalled that everyone was already so well acquainted with the material, it took just two weeks to get it in the can: The production’s success inspired director Trevor Nunn to film it. In performance, the theatrical metaphor should remind the audience that they’re watching a pretense even as they’re invested in the character’s fate. He speculates that Shakespeare’s description of life as a “poor player” was a deliberate attempt by the playwright to give the actor an interpretive hook they could relate to. McKellen makes a true meal of “out, out, brief candle”, relating it to Lady Macbeth’s final appearance, the fools proceeding to their dusty death earlier in the monologue, and Elizabethan stage lighting. Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player, McKellen begins his examination of the text by noting how “she would have died hereafter” sets up the final soliloquy’s preoccupation with time, and its passage.Ĭreeps in this petty pace from day to day,Īnd all our yesterdays have lighted fools ![]() ![]() Everything disgusts him, and his only reason for fighting to the death is that the thought of subjection is the most disgusting of all. What fuels him most is envy, reaching incredulously forward (“The seed of Banquo kings?”) and backward to color the despair of “Duncan is in his grave.” The words, and the mind behind them, are rancid, and it is this mood that takes possession of his last scenes. Once her prosaic, limited ambition is achieved, she is of no more use to him and he shrugs her off “she would have died hereafter” is a moment of exasperation that dares our laughter. His wife pulls him along a road that he would travel anyway and he can allow himself scruples, knowing that she will be there to mop them up. McKellen’s Macbeth is witty not merely the horror but the absurdity of his actions strikes him from the outset, and he can regard his downfall as an inexorable joke. The New York Times raved about the production, declaring McKellen “the best equipped British actor of his generations:” A priest used to sit on the front row, whenever he could scrounge a ticket, holding out his crucifix to protect the cast from the evil we were raising. Somehow it was magic: and black magic, too. My uniform jacket had buttons embossed with ‘Birmingham Fire Service’ my long, leather coat didn’t fit, nor did Banquo‘s so we had to wear them slung over the shoulder Judi Dench, as Lady Macbeth, wore a dyed tea-towel on her head. John Napier‘s entire set cost £200 and the costumes were a ragbag of second-hand clothes. It was beautifully done on the cheap in The Other Place, the old tin hut along from the main theatre. As McKellen recalled in a longer meditation on the trickiness of staging this particular tragedy: McKellen was, at the time, deeply immersed in Macbeth, playing the title role opposite Judi Dench in a bare bones Royal Shakespeare Company production that opened in the company’s Stratford studio before transferring to the West End. In this way, he says, “the actor is the playwright and the character simultaneously.” Instead, he calls upon actors to apply the power of their intellect to every line, analyzing metaphors and imagery, while also noting punctuation, word choice, and of course, the events leading up to the speech. ![]()
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