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