Macbeth, on stage

By: Shanta Gokhale

The most fascinating characters in Macbeth are the three witches. Are they merely a medium through whom an evil thought is planted in Macbeth’s mind for him to take forward or kill as he chooses? Or are they harbingers of a destiny that he cannot escape, cloaked as it is in halftruths? The looks of the witches too suggest ambiguity. They are wild and withered, but are they even human? They appear to be women but their beards belie this. To interpret the witches then, is to take your stand in the philosophical debate between free will and destiny.

In Ratan Thiyam’s Macbeth, the inaugural play at the three-day Rashtriya Maharang Parishad of Mumbai University’s Academy of Theatre Arts held last week, the witches are white and faceless, sprawled on the ground, flailing and thrashing their root-like tentacles as they pronounce their prophesies in high screechy voices. But they are more than mere heralds. Thiyam also casts them as Birnam Wood that camouflages the army on its march to Dunsinane. Thus the idea of free will is settled. When the forces of evil work so actively towards the fulfilment of their own prophesies, what can their victims do but rush headlong towards self-destruction?

Thiyam is totally faithful to the original play in plot and speech up to this point. Whether the translation holds to Shakespeare’s verse form or is converted into prose is difficult to say for us who do not understand Meitilon, which we assume is the language of the play. What we can say, however, given the testimony of our ears, is that the speech lacks the rhythms and cadences that we expect from verse. Perhaps this is because the actors’ voices are pitched uniformly high and their style is mostly declamatory, disallowing subtleties of vocal inflection.

Visually, the play is as spectacular as Thiyam’s earlier work leads us to expect, although none has reached the beauty and truth of his Chakravyuha. Thiyam has created imaginative costumes and headgear that indicate a tribal context for the story. The props he has designed are often larger than life. One of the most effective is the long scroll, figured with hieroglyphs, which stands for the letter Macbeth writes to Lady Macbeth after his meeting with the witches. The servant who brings it to her, tightly rolled up, unfurls its entire length across the front of the stage with a single deft movement. Lady Macbeth reads it with growing excitement and then, in a surprising move, picks it up and flings it around her shoulders as though to clothe herself in its contents.

Macbeth has spectacular moments of pure theatre too. One of the most masterfully choreographed is the scene in which Lady Macbeth and her retinue welcome Duncan. The other is Macbeth standing over Duncan’s supine body, swinging his outsize sword slowly like a time-measuring pendulum, before bringing it down. At the very moment of murder, the lights snap off. The light that comes on immediately afterwards is red, spotlighting Duncan’s bed, which is now covered in a flood of red fabric. The carefully contrived magic of this moment makes the audience gasp.

Unfortunately there are also instances of obvious, illustrative banality in Macbeth. After the messenger announces the king’s arrival and Lady Macbeth presumably says, “The raven himself is hoarse/That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan/Under my battlements”, we hear an unconvincing squawk on the soundtrack. Again, when she says, “Hark! Peace! It was the owl that shrieked,” the supposed owl twitters.

But these instances are nothing compared to nurses in white nursefrocks and caps, trundling in wheel chairs bearing bandaged dummies, supposedly infected with the Macbeth disease of uncontrollable greed for wealth and power. This is what Thiyam’s Macbeth has been leading to - a judgemental cry against the greed of today’s world that breeds violence and destroys all that is human in humanity. Once the theatre of the obvious takes over, we are not surprised to see the murder of Macbeth represented by a red-lit heap of garbage that women in surgical masks sweep together.

We cannot quarrel with a director’s interpretation of a play or his right to represent it in the manner most suited to his genius. But equally if the manner doesn’t work for us, we must say so. Didacticism has had its day. We like to read our own meanings into works of art, not have them hammered into us. There lies the rub in Ratan Thiyam’s Macbeth.