So, I just got home from watching Macbeth at the Castle Amphitheater, and I wanted to blog about it before I forget all my pertinent thoughts. It was hugely enjoyable, and it turns out that the guy who played Macbeth is one of my husband's old friends. I think he enjoyed the play more than I did, for that reason.
Okay, so, the production: I loved the amount of audience participation. We as the audience were encouraged to be vocal during the performance. I overheard one of the actors saying the less the audience participated, the harder they had to work. I really feel like it added quite a bit to the production, because I wasn't just sitting there watching the actors have fun. I was able to participate in the fun.
There were no set-pieces at all. It was just a blank stage with a couple of ladders and a scrim in the back. The actors were responsible for coming up with their own costumes and props, so it was something of a hodge-podge, but I didn't mind. The whole production had a really organic feel to it, which I really enjoyed. It didn't feel like your average Shakespeare production, where old people stand on stage and slowly recite monologues, because they think that talking slow means talking powerfully. It was just a bunch of young, vibrant people playing around and having fun and allowing the audience to share the fun with them.
So as I read your post, it seemed that this type of production would work really well with a comedy because it seems to open itself up to uncertainty and random acts. I'm curious, did it work well with this tragedy, or did you feel that it lost some of its tragic feel?
ReplyDeleteIt worked well in this instance, but Macbeth has a huge amount of comic relief. That's pretty common in Shakespeare's tragedies, though. Things go from really happy and funny through the majority of the play to really intense and depressing at the end. This rendition was really successful in bringing the tone to that dramatic level when the scene called for it.
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