Macbeth is a Shakespeare play that might not exist if it were not for the first folio. It is fitting that The Old Globe is of renewable new production of the Scottish play well the first folio with here in San Diego. Beth spoke with Jonathan cake about tackling the role of Macbeth. I heard this production being described as abstract in bold. Is there anything that you would want to tell an audience coming to the plate in terms of maybe the expectations they should bring early behind? For 400 odd years you can mess with him if you think it is messing with him all you like. He does not care. His plays are tougher than old boots. They will survive whatever you throw at them. It is the template for all of the great thrillers and our culture. Everything proceeds from an original act like crime and punishment. All of these are from the original. In my opinion it is the best. It is a crazy rides. It is half as short as Hamlet. There is a reason but -- because he understood that it has two motor to his and. It will leave an audience if we do it decently breathless as it has been doing for -- hundreds of years. What is it like in this particular production of Macbeth? How are you see the characters speak We have the framework of the play the inset in the first world war. It is the great war when we really started as a world to realize what the effects of war are. Poets and writers talked about it. They describe what it does to the mind as well to the bodies of people. It seem like a great place to start the play. The play begins in some of the bloodiest violence imaginable. They are -- there are extraordinary lines in the play. Macbeth is described in rewarded and eulogize for and seeming someone . It is not even a downward slice. It is a crazy disemboweling -- it is the description that boggles the mind. That is just where we start the play. Nothing feared of what the self did make strange images of death. Shakespeare seems to be explicitly talking about the Chasity. I think it shows you that you cannot get rid of the associations of that, is that is the life that you begin to play living and. That is where we start. I think we are not the first to think that the play is an extraordinary steady PTSD as well as many other things. I do think it is a huge importantly factor in what he does. You mentioned the opening of the play, which begins steeped in blood. It is a very bloody play. It is. Let Excel dashboard is so extraordinary in this play. It is like having your own private art gallery. It is like you get to see your own private art gallery from a subtly different angle with a light hitting it in a slightly different way and refracting through your imagination. That is so glorious. The images of blood are not only awful and horrific, but they are beautiful. We live by the blood in our veins. We are tied to people by blood. Blood is not just this image of poorer. It is a statement of humanity. The relationship between McBeth and -- Macbeth and Lady Macbeth is not played as intimately as it seems to be in the tax. The happiest couple and Shakespeare. I think it is true. They end up pretty jolly. You could imagine them having some feisty dinnertable arguments. I think the play proceeds from the basis of love from an intense July at their own partnership. I think one of the great tragedies is because it becomes a study on loneliness. He becomes more and more isolated. There is a possibility to stay whole if you continue to love his wife Barbie is closely tied to his wife at the end of the play as he was at the beginning. I don't know how these dictators -- what the exact details of the domestic lives were. You can imagine somebody blithely carrying on their merry way because they feel like they are reflected in each other. Once there is no one else to reflect yourself and, -- in, the terrible conference this consequence of what he has done is impossible for Macbeth to avoid. He is more as much by his loneliness and his loss of her as it is by what he has done other people. Thank you very much. Thank you. Macbeth run through July 24 on the Festival stage. Listen to his podcast all about the curse of the Scottish play on KPBS.ORG.
"Macbeth" is one of Shakespeare's plays that might not have existed if it were not for the First Folio. So it's fitting that the Old Globe is offering a bold new production of the Scottish tragedy while the First Folio is here in San Diego.
RELATED: Podcast Episode 77: The First Folio And Shakespearemania
"Macbeth" supposedly carries a curse and according to theater superstition it may be because there are real witches' spells in Shakespeare’s text. Or perhaps it's because the play is a challenge to produce.
Shakespeare opens "Macbeth" with the Weird Sisters and provides anyone mounting a production of the play with an immediate dilemma: how does one depict the witches? Orson Welles famously set the play in Haiti and made them practitioners of voodoo while a recent production with Patrick Stewart made them creepy nurses with Silent Hill overtones.
"I think when you ask yourself, who are the witches, what you are really asking is, what does evil mean to me or to my society?," Brian Kulick said. He is tackling “Macbeth” at the Old Globe this summer.
"Approaching the witches I wanted to find a world where evil is made manifest through circumstance and Shakespeare gives you the prompt by it being a war, and Macbeth being a warrior," Kulick said.
In this production, the war Macbeth is apparently returning from is World War I.
"So the metaphor that’s governing this production is a psychological trauma ward of a veterans’ hospital in World War I," Old Globe artistic director Barry Edelstein explained. "So what Brian has figured out, is that it is really investigating evil from a psychological point of view. So the witches become nurses on this psychiatric ward and wounded soldiers themselves, and what we are dealing with is what at that time was called shell shock, and what today we call PTSD."
Kulick's production reframes the question of the play.
"Is evil a supernatural force that these witches bring to earth through their chants and through their spells, and their communication with devils and stuff like that or is evil a human force, that is we take actions and those actions are what are evil?" Edelstein said.
Using the horrors of war as a vivid backdrop brings the play’s language of blood into bold relief.
"The play is talking about something more than supernatural elements. It’s talking about when a society goes wrong," Kulick said. "The play is more than a cauldron and witches incanting, it’s a play about the culture of warfare and a way of being that can’t switch itself off, the war is over but this energy to do damage to another human being still is living in the bodies of these people.
"I’m a big believer in letting language do the job and that evoking it is sometimes stronger than actually seeing it," Kulick said.
Kulick does not have blood flowing on stage as some productions do but he does stunningly draw a transparent red drape across the entire stage so we feel like we are immersed in a sea of blood, which conjures up an image from the text.
"There is a famous line about blood being on a murderer’s hands and enough blood is on his hands to turn the ocean red, which is a mind blowing idea," Edelstein said.
Jonathan Cake, who plays Macbeth, extolled the method of portraying blood.
"Blood is so extraordinary in this play, it’s amazing," Cake said. "It’s like having your own private art gallery. It’s like you get with every time you say these lines, you get to see your own private art gallery from a totally different angle with the light hitting it in a different way and refracting through your imagination in a slightly different way."
This production makes you ask what happens to someone’s mind when it is their profession to unseam someone from the nave to the chops? The play opens in a veterans hospital and perhaps never leaves — suggesting that all that has occurred might be in Macbeth’s mind.
That’s a provocative interpretation but Cake said Shakespeare can take anything you throw at him because this play is so strong.
"It’s a crazy propulsive ride. It’s exactly half as short as 'Hamlet.' And there is a reason for that — it's because it is understood that the story has to motor to it’s end. And it will leave an audience — if we do it halfway decently — breathless as it has been doing for these many hundred years. It is an amazing piece of work," Cake said.
This production lives up to the witch’s instruction of being bloody, bold and resolute — but with a modern twist.
The Old Globe's "Macbeth" runs through July 24 at the Lowell Davies Festival Stage. Listen to Cinema Junkie Podcast 80 to hear all about the curse of the Scottish play.
