Staging Macbeth
One director, one assistant director, one movement coach, two dramaturgs, one stage manager, one assistant stage manager, one dialect coach (two if you count Ben), eleven actors plus the entire staff of Actors’ Shakespeare Project. I’m sure I’m leaving someone out but that should give you an idea of how many people it takes to put on a show like Macbeth.
Rehearsals began with a read-through of the script. On the second day of rehearsal, Adrianne had us do a second read through, giving everyone a chance to just play and see where we’d take the show naturally. It took just about four hours. It was so much fun watching when people felt compelled to move, compelled to be still, to scream or to quietly simmer, and then to see the whole group fall into the rhythm of the show; it was pretty intense. I think a lot came out of the second reading that has guided us in what we’ve done to date.
As we move through the process you can see the difference in the show. Once everyone knows what they’re saying and starts talking to each other, really connecting, you see the story unfold. We’re to the point where everyone’s living the text. How could you not? With the amount of research that’s gone into this on everyone’s part we all inhabit the world of the Scottish Play fairly completely (at least for 5-8 hours a day). You can see it in the actors’ bodies. They’re walking differently, a turn of the head says so much, the flash in the eyes, their speech is more affected and yet more natural. They’re becoming. We’re all becoming. It’s funny how easily the language spills out into your everyday. Words like “tis” and phrases like “let’s away” slowly creep into your real world speech. People look at you funny, but you get used to it.
Here are a few of the books that have made the rounds for research during rehearsals (this is just the tip of the iceberg): The Arden Shakespeare Macbeth (the Holy Bible of Macbeth texts; almost everyone in rehearsal has a copy and we refer to it daily); The Masks of Macbeth by Marvin Rosenberg (hard to find—if you have a question about the text Rosenberg breaks it down almost to the word and gives you several interpretations of a given line); The Shakespeare Lexicon and Quotation Dictionary (tripped up on a word? These volumes leave nothing out); Asimov’s Guide to Shakespeare (yes, Isaac Asimov—it’s a pretty great read and a painless way to get a quick summary and some interesting notes on the story).
Here’s to continued and renewed energy!
Dawn
Assistant Director
the management
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Reader Comments (3)
That's because the world of the published Shakespearean text is like the world of John 14.2: there are many mansions, and choosing where to live can be difficult. Hamlet offers us three significantly different published versions from Shakespeare's own time, and literally hundreds of subsequent editions, all based on those three early texts but making more or less extensive choices and changes.
There is only one early text of Macbeth, from the Folio of 1623, but over the intervening four centuries a couple of hundred editors, and thousands of producers and directors, have struggled to find a modification of that text to serve as a workable blueprint for a particular production.
Among all those texts, the Arden edition of which Dawn speaks is widely respected. The term is actually ambiguous. The Arden series of editions of Shakespeare was inaugurated in 1899. Distinguished scholars were invited to edit each play, and by the mid-1930s the series included almost the entire canon. After WWII, the editorial principles that had governed the First Series began to seem old-fashioned, and a Second Series was begun. Again, by the early 1980s, most of the plays had been edited a second time by a second set of editors. Again, however, changes in editorial practice seemed to call for fresh approaches, and a Third sSeries was begun; it is still in process.
From the outset, the Arden series have been distinguished by their exceptionally full apparatus: long, detailed introductions laying out the particular problems raised by each play and providing extensive treatments of matters such as date, sources, and textual history; very full notes; and appendices reprinting source texts and giving essay-length notes on especially complex issues.
Other modern editions, however--notably the competing series from the Oxford and Cambridge University pressess--have attempted to emulate the authority and scope of the Arden, with considerable success. Modern readers thus have a variety of impressive editions from which to choose.
The text of the current ASP production is derived from the Arden Shakespeare, Second Series. In this series Kenneth Muir reworked the First Series edition by Henry Cuningham in 1951, revised the work in 1971, and revised it again in 1984. In establishing a script from which the actors could work, Adrianne paid close attention to Muir's modernization of the Folio's spelling and punctuation, and his occasional emendations (modification of the Folio language to solve otherwise intractable problems of understanding and interpretation). Even before the actors saw the text however, sa certain amount of material had been cut, and the order of some scenes changed, and during rehearsals, other cuts were made, and a few earlier cuts restored. The text as performed will thus refer to Muir's text at many points, but will not represent it fully and exactly.
David Evett
Actors' Shakesapeare Project Scholar in Residence