Last week was quite the bonanza of activity. I have yet to write my thoughts on Monday’s meeting with friends from college, but I certainly will. It connects to Macbeth. Everything connects to the themes in Macbeth, which this production was very keen to emphasise. They might as well have slapped an IDF badge on Macbeth, if the Guardian review was anything to go by. “Fair is foul, and foul is fair” is probably a better description of my own interpretation; it might be clear that Macbeth is the villain, but how this evil has come about and affected him uniquely is less so. It is however Macbeth who is the terrorist, and he is shunned by his own countrymen for it. Perhaps Palestinians need to channel their inner Macduff, and deal with who is to blame for the many deaths of innocents – it is the mad, bad terrorists.
It was the first time I had seen Macbeth, so I don’t know if the character always seems so uninteresting. There is quite a lot of emphasis on his youth and the potential for him to have a family one day, and indeed he seems a little obsessed with his legacy, or lack of it. I couldn’t buy this from Ralph Fiennes any more. Perhaps he would never suit the part, but at 60 the desire for power and the descent to madness seems implausible. The dagger scene completely passed me by; an older man with mental illness would not be taken by surprise by any of it, nor fear it. Even his fear of the witches seems odd. Age provides security about perception and about one’s fate, and that was all I saw – a secure person. Perhaps I would believe it all much more from younger, more neurotic actors like David Tennant. I saw Fiennes as Prospero many years ago, and it was quite unforgettable; a presence that makes it really hard to ever watch The Tempest again, because every other production is irrelevant.
Here is an incredibly bad picture of the curtain call – we were sitting in the front row, and I felt like an oaf taking out my phone, so I entirely fumbled it:
The enduring appeal of Macbeth is presumably the fact that evil is so very common, although evil fuelled by schizophrenia is maybe less so. The madness seemed sad, and almost elicited sympathy. I didn’t particularly care why he was so very bad, whether it was because of the implied loss of his own child, or the paranoid delusions of who would threaten his power. It was in this production not really Lady Macbeth. She merely encouraged paranoia, but from there is was all downhill. It was only his fear that unseated him, because it led him to acts so monstrous that others were driven to unite against him.
It is this lack of unity in the face of terror that I find so strange in the present day. Power crazed terrorists threaten everything about our way of life, and have done for some time. They do so for a variety of reasons which are complex, but the desire for power is not. It is therefore also not complex to see that aligning against our own interests merely to point out that war has tragic outcomes for children makes nonsense of their deaths. The primary actors putting children in harm’s way are Hamas, whose entire approach is based on the ends justifying the means, and exploiting the tragedy they have created to create further justification for aggression.
Wars have aggressors and defenders, and inevitably as the war proceeds this becomes harder to delineate; but the trigger is usually clear. It was England that declared war, but Germany that invaded Poland. There was no justification to destroy Dresden, but that did not change the overall justification of Britain seeking to defend Europe from an authoritarian genocide.
The most touching line in Macbeth is this, and yet we seem unable to define who is who in our own time:
Son: And must they all be hanged that swear and lie?
Lady Macduff: Every one.
Son: Who must hang them?
Lady Macduff: Why, the honest men.
Son: Then the liars and swearers are fools, for there are liars and swearers enough to beat the honest men, and hang up them.
The resting writer 
Leave a comment