Plotting a murder? It’s an everyday business
Currently preparing to star in the RSC’S ‘Macbeth’, Christopher Eccleston and Niamh Cusack talk to Ben Lawrence
Christopher Eccleston has waited a long time to play Macbeth. Ever since he was 17, in fact, and appeared as Macduff in an amateur production. It was a transformative experience, he recalls.
“I didn’t know about Shakespeare. I’d studied Henry V at school and hated it because I was conditioned to say Shakespeare’s not for me, it’s a load of b-------, I don’t understand this language. But I felt that because Macbeth was a soldier I could play him. My dad had done National Service.”
Now, more than 35 years later, Eccleston is finally getting his chance, in a Royal Shakespeare Company production at Stratford-upon-avon, directed by Polly Findlay and costarring the revered Irish actress Niamh Cusack as Lady Macbeth.
So why has it taken so long for one of our greatest actors to take on the Thane of Cawdor? Perhaps, as he has suggested last week, because of his roots. On the Today programme, he discussed how he was never offered Shakespeare roles as a result of his council estate background and northern accent; he will be playing the role in his native accent.
When I meet him and Cusack at the RSC’S south London rehearsal space, we pick up the discussion about the regional prejudice that he sees as blighting the acting industry.
I mention the theatre legend Barrie Rutter, who recently left Northern Broadsides, the company he formed in order to allow actors with regional accents to have access to classical roles, because the Arts Council told him he was no longer relevant.
“That says a lot about the times we’re in,” says Eccleston, “There is a hatred of difference so we have to speak up and we have to speak frankly. It is not a nuanced argument.”
Macbeth is his second professional shot at Shakespeare after playing Hamlet at West Yorkshire Playhouse in 2002. Despite critical acclaim, he wasn’t happy with his performance then he says. “It didn’t belong to me intellectually. I was carrying a lot of social and cultural baggage [about] me not being an intellectual. Thank god I don’t feel that now.”
This time, he has the advantage of sharing the limelight with Cusack. After two months of rehearsals, the pair are obviously comfortable with each other, and they say they immediately struck up a strong rapport when they first met. “Within minutes, we couldn’t stop laughing, which we weren’t supposed to do,” explains Eccleston. “Niamh looked at me and said: ‘Oh, we’re in trouble’. ”
Of course, Macbeth is one of Shakespeare’s most frequently performed works (another new production with Rory Kinnear and Anne-marie Duff is currently in preview at the National), but both Eccleston and Cusack are adamant that this particular production has something to say – notably at a time when the old balance of power between the sexes is being upturned. “We were keen to steer away from misogyny in the way Lady Macbeth has been presented as this sexual, manipulative harpy and Macbeth is the innocent male,” says Eccleston. “[In our version] the Macbeths are equal in morality when it comes to murder. Shakespeare is interested in gender and what it is to be male and female. Macbeth, like me, is insecure about his masculinity.”
I find it hard to imagine that the strapping and authoritative Eccleston has ever had such struggles. “I think all the best men are,” he laughs. “It is impossible to avoid what’s happened with Me Too and Weinstein and all those things, and I am so glad to see these changes because I was brought up in a patriarchal way and I’ve had my struggles with that. So what you have here is an equal marriage – we are both on the poster.”
Cusack points to the Macbeths’ second scene together, when the idea of murdering Duncan suddenly becomes tangible, as crucial to understanding their partnership.
“We had a sense that it is like any marriage,” she says. “It is so intimate, so domestic. It’s like: ‘I thought you were going to call to the bank about the mortgage.’ Only, of course, they are talking about murder. There’s something terribly immediate about it.”
Although Findlay’s Macbeth speaks to now, both actors say that it avoids trying to be too obviously modern.
“I’m not keen on trendy labels, because the language is so rich and so evocative,” says Cusack. “Polly is very clever in making the characters recognisably modern archetypes, but we don’t get caught up in emailing or phones because it would diminish the play’s power.”
“It would be fetishistic,” agrees Eccleston. “The plays are universal and eternal: if you get caught up in the minutiae it becomes ‘look how clever they are’. These aren’t plays of the head, they are plays of the soul and the heart, and the head must not intrude. Too much intellectualising is interference.”
Eccleston is 53 and Cusack is 59 and, without wishing to sound impertinent, I suggest their maturity brings out the play’s essential sadness – something often missing when younger performers take on the roles.
“The oldness resonates,” agrees Cusack. “There is that sense of things being finite, of there not being lots more chances. And, of course death has touched them both. There is the loss of children and that Macbeth is a soldier.” It’s interesting to think that in these days when gender-blind and race-blind casting are becoming all the rage, maybe there should be a drive for “age blind” casting, too.
Cusack agrees. “I remember seeing Gwen Ffrangcon-davies do Juliet. She was in her nineties but it was amazing how she located the spirit of a 14-yearold. Age blindness is a different take but it does have a validity. There should be a place for it. My vision is to see a 60-year-old Hamlet.”
Eccleston also feels passionately about having more disabled actors up on stage performing with the ablebodied.
“That has to change, particularly for this playwright. He didn’t see the differences in what people looked like, he only saw the soul. I want to go and see Macbeth performed by an actor in a wheelchair, but not because he is in a wheelchair. I am going to see his soul.”
There is a more practical pessimism, of course, when starring in Macbeth with the curse of the Scottish play hanging heavy over any performer. Cusack, who is a keen cyclist, admits that she is just “waiting for God to take me”.
Eccleston interjects, paraphrasing Lady Macbeth’s most famous soliloquy.
“Come, you spirits – take my bicycle clips. Unclip me here and fill me from the crown to the toe-top full of Gatorade.”
Something makes me think Shakespeare would approve of such misappropriation of his work.