That Scottish Show

I saw a NW Coast Indian production of Macbeth and was, on balance, disappointed. It was about 2/3 in Tlingit and 1/3 in English, with the ostensible distinction being that the individualizing bits (almost exclusively Macbeth's soliloquies and the exchanges between him and Lady Macbeth) were in English, while the community-building bits (pretty much everything else, maybe including the witches, although I don't remember) were in Tlingit: this for obviously colonial v. colonized reasons. But I couldn't really tell what community-building actually comprised, other than not-Macbeth's-plotting; that is, it didn't seem to have been conceived affirmatively. And so there was the interesting irony of Dr. WASP getting annoyed by yet another careless stereotyping of EuroAmerican culture. I like to think, though, that I'm a bit more sophisticated in my annoyance thereby than they were in their deployment. After all, I don't disagree with the basic assertion, I just think it's neither black & white nor always destructive.

The other major thing I noticed is that linguistic competence appears to be essential to the appreciation of Shakespeare. For the Tlingit parts, they projected the English lines on screens above the stage. I tried, several times, to ignore the screens and see if I could follow just from the acting and the fact that I'd read the play just that week. But I couldn't. It's not just knowing the words of a language, but how they're used: intonation & connotation, e.g. Frankly, it often seemed spoken in the manner of grand Victorian Shakespeare, i.e., bad Shakespeare, only in Tlingit. And the actors' mannerisms seemed quite generic, quite similar throughout the play regardless of the dramatic context. So I'm left wondering if this is generally true regardless of the spoken language being used, because as a native Anglophone in America I don't particularly distinguish between bodily and verbal language in most of the theatre I see. That's why I would be interested to see the Macbeth for mimes now, which seems well-nigh impossible unless I become a P-Republican (the kind that can ignore the laws of physics).

I also watched the 'famous' minimalist Macbeth (1979 film of the 1976 staging) with Ian McDumbledore (I forget his last name), Judi Dench, the Star Wars imperial emperor, and Scrooge's nephew from the George C. Scott version of "A Christmas Carol." It SUCKED. Just — ugh. It, too, was bad Shakespeare. Staged well, but performed badly. I don't quite know how to describe it other than that MacB and Lady MacB's characters were melodramatic. (I don't know what it is with Shakespeare: insanity, grief, anguish, despair, terror, remorse, and horror are all acted virtually identically. There should be a generational moratorium on using a tremulous voice to express emotion in Shakespeare, to break the habit. I saw Othello downtown a year or two ago, with the lead played by the space-station commander in Star Trek:[space station]; I have no idea where he got the idea that debilitating cognitive dissonance begets full-body Parkinson's, but it sure seemed to in that instance.) And some of the crucial supporting characters were wooden. Petrified wood. It was the no-name actors who gave the best performances. And then there were some bits that were just gross. I don't mean the blood; one is used to movie gore these days: I mean the drool. There was a surprising amount of drool in that show, and it tended to come in great gobs. Ick. On the other hand, the set-less staging made for some interesting accommodations of special effects.

So, my track record with Macbeth is not very good so far. I got another version on DVD; Ebert's review is promising, but I guess I'll see.