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.