‘Imagine that the National Grid went down, the lights went out...’
National Theatre artistic director RUFUS NORRIS talks about Macbeth ahead of the company’s contemporary, dystopian and war-torn production that visits Nottingham’s Theatre Royal this month
WHENEVER I am starting on a project there are a couple of questions which I try to answer and they relate to the personal, the political or the socio-political. On a personal level Macbeth was a play that I studied at Kidderminster College when I was young and grew very attached to. The play really sang in the most simple way. Looking back it was probably one of the first things that made me think about directing.
My dad was very interested in medieval history and I too am fascinated by that part of our national history. My partner comes from Scotland so I have spent quite a lot of time there, particularly on the east coast of Scotland where the play is set and I know Fife really well and a lot of the areas that Shakespeare talks about in Macbeth. In terms of the socio-political side of it there’s always a question about resonance; why do this play at this moment now? I think the play speaks very keenly about a lot of aspects of the present. It’s a story of corrupted leadership and ambition survival. You don’t have to look very far in terms of what’s near at hand to see how ambition can change leaders. Once they start taking various courses of action we discover how that can lead to a corruption of them literally and spiritually.
In the beginning of the play we see one of the most successful marriages in Shakespeare. Macbeth and Lady Macbeth form a very strong union and that gets deconstructed and pulled apart because of the effects of leadership and its challenges.
What Shakespeare is talking about is not 1606 London but the chronicles of Holinshed. Shakespeare referred to him constantly and Holinshed is writing about 11th-century Scotland. He writes about the times when the Viking invasions and the Norwegians were ravaging a lot of coasts of Scotland and the south of England. Trying to keep the kingdom together at that time would have been really difficult.
In the play the ambition stakes obviously come through and the relationships become very strong. But there is something else in there which is true to the 11th-century origin of it which is crucially about survival. For people to get by – to even live – in an environment like that you have to be very quick and take opportunities when they come and sometimes that requires radical action. There is another big aspect of the play beyond the personal and the political and that is the metaphysical.
The witches are a huge part of it and it is
interesting that when Macbeth writes to Lady Macbeth he doesn’t say “Bloody hell! I met some witches”, he says “I met the witches and they said this...”. So there is something quite normal about that level of superstition or other worldly goings on in that world. Again, if you look at conflict situations, superstition rises to the surface and people take whatever they can; lucky charms or belief systems. These belief systems come out of the environment to help them find a way through it. So I wanted to find a way of setting it which honoured that. Christianity has been pretty embedded and secure in Britain for a long time from the 14th century onwards. We are probably more irreligious now than we have been in this country for maybe a thousand years but in that time, the 11th century, the pagan beliefs systems that are underneath our Christianity would have been more prevalent.
What’s always a challenge when you’ve got an element like the weird sisters in a play, which does go beyond human behaviour, is how far you try and find the root of their words in normal human behaviour. If you imagine a group of people who were once people and have adapted to survive and have the kind of wisdom that you associate with the ancient version of what witches might have been about – they could tell you stuff about yourself that seems impossible to know. Like Derren Brown!
My take on it is that in that in our past deep spiritual history, as in probably every community on the planet, we have had a very symbiotic deep relationship with nature, which we may have lost. The Green Man is, in a sense, the iconic British epitome of that. The Green Man is the forest and the spirit of nature and is ambivalent. I think the witches are reflecting back on to Macbeth what they see in him. He is described by the witches as “Till he unseamed him from the nave to th’ chops and fixed his head upon our battlements”. In our production we do that as we open the play. So they can see in Macbeth, out of all these murderous, vengeful people that he is the most murderous and the most vengeful in this desecrated landscape. I suppose my secret theory is that I see in Macbeth the man that can do that, who can take things so bad that things they will get better. They don’t know it so they offer him the opportunity.
In terms of the artistic vision of this production of Macbeth the contemporary is an obvious place to go to. If you imagine that the National Grid went down now and the lights went out and the internet went within five minutes then the banks stopped delivering money and the rubbish stopped being collected, in a week’s time our urban landscapes would look completely different. In a month’s time it would be unrecognisable. In a year’s time people would have adapted in whatever way the could. Well, the ones that had survived but it would probably look a lot more like 11th-century Scotland. So to set it in a post-civil war in a contemporary way seemed to me a very resonant way of doing it. It also chimes with what we are all looking at on our phones and on newsfeeds and everything else.
For the tour we have changed the design and aspects of it and we are developing the witches in fact. We are tying them into the environment much more to get a little closer to what I was just talking about. The supernatural in a natural place. The challenge in that is how you go from the National Theatre to Bath or other theatres that are much smaller. That means we have a composite set which means we can do version A or version B. Version A being the bigger one and version B being the slightly smaller. It’s the same show but the version B can slightly shrink to fit. With every venue you want it to be bespoke so the gang will come in and have a look round and adapt and space it out and make sure that it really fits the stage environment.
One of the aspects of the play is that the Birnam Wood trees are stylised and they’re poles so we have trained the witches to climb them so that there is a sense of them having a place to escape to especially when the fighting starts. Also they have a place where they can look down on the action and it gives them a slightly otherworldly feel. That training takes quite a long time and it also means that is a visual aspect of the show that we can enhance and we will go quite a lot further with this time.
I hope our new lease of life from the original National Theatre Olivier production will create in the audience the same fascination with the drama that I had all those years ago and still retain.
National Theatre’s Macbeth runs from Tuesday, January 22, to Saturday January 26. Tue-Sat evenings 7.30pm, and matinees Thursday 2pm and Saturday 2.30pm. Ticket prices £10-£34.50 plus discounts for Royal Members, under-16s, 16-25-year-olds, schools and groups from www.trch.co.uk 0115 989 5555.