Four days to go

Well four days till we have an audience. The cast has done a brilliant job, they're ready to go and I am impressed with them.

The only issue is whether the costumes, lighting, sound and other effects and the cast are working together. Tomorrow we have all the costumes, the smoke, the smells, the props, and the curtains up, but getting the cast and the bits and pieces working together is my big worry.

There is much to do. I spent much of the afternoon hanging curtains, these are the 'set'. I also went to hang the gauze, which was a major effort and I discovered the way we intended to do it won't work.

Tomorrow we are without the stage manager and lighting operator for the morning and various cast have given me ultimatums about when they can start and finish.

What it seems is that it's harder and harder to get actors to rehearsals and to get techs and backstage people at all. Today people are working weekends and evenings and anyone with technical skills wants to be paid. Not having a set seemed to be one way to ensure that we could strike the set each night (as we have to) and save effort and energy.

Well the play looks good.

24 days to go

We open in 24 days. That fills me with dread. We've still seen no costumes, no props and have no sound effects.
On the plus side despite another witch pulling out last week and one of the unnamed Lords having to pull out following a car accident as his leg is in plaster we have a full cast and the play is looking good.

We do have a gauze at last and I have resolved the issues around the staging. Also the lighting plan is being developed and same with special effects seem to be on track. Chanel is sorting out the music.

So provided no more problems arise we are on track.

This is almost the time when I wonder why it matters, why it's so hard and why oh why do we do this.

Acting and direction

In the last post I mentioned Meisner, Stanislavsky and method. I'm not wanting to seem to be trendy or throwing around names of acting schools without understanding them so just a little here on what I meant. I know only a little about Strasberg, Meisner, Stansilavsky, Adler and some of the 20th century approaches to acting. And, for example, I'm not keen on apparently repititious meaningless exchanges as a way of learning to react (Meisner is well known for these exercises). At the level of theatre I work at we haven't time for weeks of exploration.
What is clear to me today is that if you are aware of modern theatre you can't help but be influenced by these schools and theories. The alternative is what I grew up with - the first few rehearsals are blocking (Stand here, move there, sit down, stand) followed by rehearsals which are tweaks of the first (sit in the middle of the line, put the gun there, say it with more passion).
What I want to see is something approaching genuine characters with motivations you can understand who move around for convincing reasons.

So I do use the blocking direction I grew up with but I have rudimentary and superficial but useful interpretations of these schools which inform my directorial style. I am drawn to what I understand from Meisner as the idea of trying to get actors in the now (what the repetition exercises are supposed to create). So that there performances are genuine in that they build from the energy and actors around them, and may differ from night to night but are motivations and reactions to others motivations. I think Meisner called this Affective Memory.
In Stanislavskly I like the idea of using imagination to understand where your character is and go with that. I mean for example neither of my actors playing Macbeth or Lady M have murdered or conspired to murder anyone as far as I am aware, so they need to imagine what it is like and go with that. Strasberg on the other hand (again as I understand it) wanted actors to draw on their own souls and psyches and reproduce their reactions to earlier events in their lives, or their psyches (I believe this is called emotion memory).

What I would say is each approach is useful for different actors. In other words where I can't get something out of an actor I may change approach. Some actors need to go back to when their pet rabbit died when they were 8 and use that to power their performance about losing a parent, another actor in the same role might simply imagine having lost his father to an assassin while a third may instead just get in the now and take on the enormity of what is being said.

I'm no expert. But I do like having a range of tools. As I eluded to earlier - our other issue is not having the luxury of spending 8 hours a day, every day, on this and not having necessarily the best material to work with. So when all else fails clever work-arounds (cheats) are really useful, that is if the actor can't stand without waving his hands around - get him to lean on things in every scene.

Progress

One of the goals I set for myself for this production is to make the relationship between the Macbeths and their murder of Duncan plausible. This has been the underlying problem with nearly every production I have seen and most of the movies.

Last night working with the two actors I have for these roles I believe we made huge progress in cracking this dilemma. Both are fantastic actors who can convey subtlety as well as a broad range of emotions and motivations. I was momentarily scared as we worked on Act 1 Scene 5. Lady M was terrifying as these lines came to life:
"Thy letters have transported me beyond This ignorant present, and I feel now The future in the instant."

After we had finished I realised how much I owe to a newsgroup called Act Pro that I used to be a member of and to people, conversations and experiences which have developed my rudimentary understanding of Meisner, Stanislavsky and method. We had both Ms in the moment and alive to the motivation in the script and alive to the intentions of who they were and where they were going. Add to that drawing on their own personal experiences to make the moment alive with genuine emotion and we really were creating.

This is shaping up as the best production I have done. False hope / vaulting ambition? I too as a director am caught in the desire to create something based in authenticity - not just for the actors and the audience but also for me.

Three different witches

The unfortunate exit from the cast of our witches (due to employment reasons) has focussed attention on the need for them to have individual personalities in some way. In other productions (to sound like a broken record) they are usually virtually indistinguishable. In the productions where there is an attempt to make them distinct there is often an older leader and a younger initiate. I'll work with Chanel, the AD, to see what we can do to give the 3 of them personalities.

Macduff

One of the many things on my list to try and improve in this production over others I have seen is to make Macduff stand out. Normally he is invisible until he is tested and he leads the attack on the castle and kills Macbeth at the end. Banquo is always easy to spot, but the Malcolm, Macduff, Ross, Angus, Menteith, Lennox distinction is harder to make.

The Court Theatre here in Christchurch did a production set in Japan a few years ago, a tribute to Kurosaka I believe. In that production Macduff was given a ludicrous hat. Even then he didn't stand out that well.

In this production we're opting for Macduff as someone who is sees through the thrall and sees Macbeth for what he is. Maybe his goodness means he isn't (as easily) enchanted. That means he stands apart from all the others, perhaps is more modern in his dress, and at the beginning of the play looks askance at Macbeth. If he is also socially awkward it might explain why he isn't trusted by Malcolm and seems to have missed the victory banquet.

This standing aside positioning and scrutiny of Macbeth combined with a touch of a puritanical view of the world worked today in rehearsals, and the actor playing Macduff seems to be able to use this to make the character of Macduff strong and distinct.

We may still give him some distinct costuming - but no dumb hats.

First rehearsal

It's good when you sit with your cast for the first time and think 'this is going to be fantastic'.

I'm now trying to tune into the way in which people work best. I like to ask actors lots of questions about their characters, their motivations and their feelings at any given time, but this is not best for everyone.

The gold in this play is character motivations, and the decision to go with emphasising the supernatural elements gives a lot of scope for characters to talk about what they see versus what is going on, or what they fear. Not everything is as it seems. Most of the characters are led a merry dance by the main protagonists and characters relationship amd reaction to the evil that pervades the play is a great place to start.

Cast selected for the play

With one or two exceptions I have a full cast. The posts now will include production issues and the processes we go through.

The normal story: 8 women capable of playing Lady Macbeth and 3 men capable of Macbeth. All of the witches I've cast could take on the role and I rejected a Lady Macbeth / Macbeth combination of 2 of the finest actors in town. However I am very pleased with the Macbeths have cast.

There were dramas in the auditons made worse as I haven't help proper auditions for 10 years having shoulder tapped since then. By the end of the day my brain was fried and judgement impaired. Also some really basic things about the next steps weren't conveyed to auditionees, by this I mean I forgot among other things to check their availability for the first read through.

Anyway as I like to sign my emails now - it's all good.

Audition enquiries suggest excellent auditions

I'm really impressed with some of the people who have contacted me about the auditions. Some because they're experienced, a couple because they're knowledgable, but most because they're keen.

Audition packs

I've started the audition packs - these include background on the ideas I have for the production, how I want to audition people, and the excerpts from the play for the auditions.

Above all I want people to give the type of audition that reflects the way they work… they can read up and prepare looking at background and the script OR turn up cold. Part of the audition is to find out how they like to work and what sort of actor they are.

I have worked with people who start rehearsals as blank canvasses and others who turn up to the first rehearsal with most of the character in place. I've had with thinkers, intuitive actors, and others who are very physical in how they develop their characters. Some audition brilliantly and never get any better, most audition at one level and just get better. I have also worked with actors who give brilliant auditions and get worse. One woman I had in a show 11 years ago I never saw her get near her audition level .....

I'm a blank canvas - I come in with ideas but really try and learn the part as I go... so I start with thinking and listening to the Director and feeling the other actors and then let it happen intiuitively. Some years ago I was cast as Amadeus, and withdrew 2 and a half weeks into 8 weeks of rehearsals when the Director wanted to know why I wasn't fully in character yet.

Anyway enough war stories I will post the audition packs and the script here in the next two weeks.

A working definition of evil

I've been considering evil and magic and how they should work in this production.

An American psychotherapist, M Scott Peck, wrote a book about evil based on working with patients who he concluded were evil. (People of the Lie; 1983) It's a great book for working out what evil might look like. His conclusions were evil is a conscious decision to not grow or prevent someone from growing to preserve an image or view of oneself. That is people who lie, cheat and misrepresent and manipulate people to preserve their own ego. When I read the book 15 years ago I did so to understand someone I had identified (I believe correctly) as evil.

There are many examples in the book of couples who are working together and their relationships are based on lying so that things remain as they want them. There's the chilling story of a couple where the husband had put himself in his wife's thrall [Peck's word not mine]because he was weak and she was dominant and in doing so he had got more and more pathetic and awake every day to head the word 'kill' in his head, while she would call him pathetic and useless to his face. In the end he kept trying to slit his throat because he knew he couldn't live without her. She on the other hand got dominance over him.

Other stories dealt with individuals - one a woman who put herself in therapy for four years but lied the whole time and had no control over anyone, couldn't hold down a job or a relationship, but didn't want her ego / spirit contraption deconstructed. that is she had this weird fantasy view of the world that everything she didn't like was someone else's fault and that she set the rules for any job she went to, any relationships she had and how she dealt with power and telephone companies. And she wouldn't change. Peck's view was a part of her probably wanted to get well but most of her (the intellect and ego) was not prepared to change and let people set rules for her. Also interestingly she had no empathy for anyone - other people just had to do what she wanted and she would impose and ascribe her feelings on them.

Anyway there were many other examples in the book but the important things for Macbeth are:

• Macbeth must voluntarily give himself and his will to achieve goals by killing others because in some sick way it reinforces him (and him is his ego / ambition / view of himself as pre-eminient over others...)
• Lady Macbeth has to also voluntarily give herself to the same goals (which she clearly does with her unsex me speech)
• Both must manipulate and lie to the same ends and reinforce each other while they are both working together (which they do) they can appear charming and civilised but their language and actions disguise their real intent
• The witches are a catalyst but the point at which Macbeth decides to kill Duncan is when he becomes taken by evil (but never, as we learn in his soliquoys, 100 % evil)
• The Macbeths should lose empathy with other people (which they do)

The other thing, rereading Peck's book, is that Shakespeare got it spot on. I had said in an earlier post that understanding of psychology had changed and that this meant portraying the Macbeths realistically is harder today. The clear message from this is that if you adopt a psychology of evil it works very well.

The stark soulessness of the 'tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow' speech matches up with something in Peck's book: he quotes Simone Weil as writing "Imaginary evil is romantic and varied, real evil is gloomy monotonous, barren and boring."

Mixing modern and old

Met with Scott today and talked through the time transition issues. Both he and Julian have cautioned that the time change and use of anachronism needs to be very deliberate to work.
The issue Scott raised is why would Macbeth and Banquo speak in Shakespearean dialect before the 'thrall' and not in modern English.
Of course they're not speaking in dark ages Scots either.

I think the answer is going back to the script and looking at all the people and events outside the Macbeths' ambit.

Macbeth hath murdered sleep

I've had insomnia for the last couple of weeks and also some bloody dreams (which I'm not going into here).
The insomnia does seem to be related to having ideas and working through issues to do with the Scottish play but also work and family etc.....

Anyway for me the thing about directing or being in a play is to really get to the heart of it and immerse myself in it. I'm wondering if sleep deprivation will give me new insights.

Oh and we've discovered the school won't let us have matinees during the week as they need the auditorium for classes as their classrooms are inadequate for the current roll. Which is a shame as one or two weekday matinees (if the cast could do them) would have been great.

The Beckhams

I've never seen a Macbeth / Lady Macbeth combination and characters that have really worked for me. The closest was a production in Gisborne on the pier in the middle of summer in about 1994. Lady Macbeth was played as disturbed right from the start, and Macbeth was either played as vague with bursts of enthusiasm or that was just the actor.

Anyway I discussed Lady Macbeth as a bit like Pauline Hanson the problem is who would Macbeth be? What would they look like as a couple? What is the dynamic? And that's where most productions fall down for me. Most versions play it like they're deeply in love - but how does that work? I've asked a few people and have answers like 'ah yes but that's why they're different - they're giving in to their dark sides, ambition'. I think when people say that, if you believe them, you should give them a wide berth. I can't find that sort of relationship in myself coming from love. It's more Charles Manson and Squeaky Fromm. To me to be realistic it needs to come from a very sick, dysfunctional relationship. It's more David Bain's family than Burton and Taylor.

Discussing it tonight the Beckhams seem a nice parallel. They're not brutal enough, but you know something is not right. He's a great warrior. And you know Posh is in charge.

Okay how many Macbeth's are there? random thoughts from 1 am

This entry looks at my central confusion with the script and performances:

1. At least there's only one text! Unlike many of Shakespeare's surviving works there is only one version of Macbeth (first folio 1623). It is known the play was revised and there are many questions about whether there was a missing subplot or whether some parts, such as Hecate's scene, aren't original.

Wikipedia has a lot to say about the origins:
Many scholars conjecture the likely date of composition to be between 1603 and 1606.[2] As the play seems to be aimed at celebrating King James's ancestors and the Stuart accession to the throne in 1603 (James believed himself to be descended from Banquo),[3] they argue that the play is unlikely to have been composed earlier than 1603; and suggest that the parade of eight kings—which the witches show Macbeth in a vision in Act IV—is a compliment to King James VI of Scotland. Other editors conjecture a more specific date of 1605-6, the principal reasons being possible allusions to the Gunpowder Plot and its ensuing trials. The Porter's speech (Act II, scene III, lines1-21), in particular, may contain allusions to the trial of the Jesuit Henry Garnet in spring, 1606; "equivocator" (line 8) may refer to Garnet's defence of "equivocation" [see: Doctrine of mental reservation], and "farmer" (4) to one of Garnet's aliases.[4] However, "farmer" is a common word, and the concept of "equivocation" was also the subject of a 1583 tract by Queen Elizabeth's chief councillor Lord Burghley, and of the 1584 Doctrine of Equivocation by the Spanish prelate Martin Azpilcueta, which was disseminated across Europe and into England in the 1590s.[5]
Scholars also cite an entertainment seen by King James at Oxford in the summer of 1605 that featured three "sibyls" like the weird sisters; Kermode surmises that Shakespeare could have heard about this and alluded to it with the weird sisters. The earliest account of a performance of the play is April 1611, when Simon Forman recorded seeing it at the Globe Theatre.

Anyway the point of this is that there is only one accepted script and so it should be pretty easy to work out how it should be done.

2. As I said in the introductory post I have seen a few productions of Macbeth -Five. I've also seen four maybe five film versions. And I have read the script many times,and studied it at school and university.

My fundamental issue is the script never reads like the plays I have seen.

In fact there are things I see in the script that don't seem to be part of any of the stage versions I've seen. Some examples 'fair is foul' and 'foul is fair' - this works for Lady Macbeth who is usually played as a very attractive woman, but therefore the ugly witches must be fair of spirit.

When I see film and stage versions Lady Macbeth and Macbeth are played as having a great love for each other.... while I can see that at a pinch in the script I more readily see some screwed up disfunctional people who really don't know enough about love.

Lady Macbeth has been played since the late 1600s (by the Davenants) as a powerful woman, yes that can work but it doesn't seem real to me. That tradition was followed by Sarah Siddons (1785) and more recently by Dame Judi Dench. In equating her character to real people I see someone who is at the beginnng of the play determined, but not necessarily as strong and intelligent. I come back to the type of people I see around me, and if say Annette Presley of Slingshot, or Helen Clark, or Theresa Gattung were Lady Macbeth they wouldn't disappear, let Macbeth mess up and then kill themselves. I see Lady Macbeth is someone whose ambition is way over their ability to understand what's going on - knowing the price of everything and value of nothing, more like Australia's One Nation founder Pauline Hanson.

My question is 'can I see Lady Macbeth and Macbeth himself in the people around me and in the headlines?' I can't see the traditionally staged Macbeths but I can see the sort of middle class people who swindle the rest of their siblings out of an estate for sheer greed, not really caring or understanding the long term consequences for them and their heirs. I can also see small-minded hoods that rip people off, deal P, and then spend much of their time in the district court, and who eventually kill their toddler.

Lady Macbeth could equally be an ambitious narrow-minded shrew. Macbeth could be a great warrior but with little understanding of niceties. What I potentially see is the wife of a rugby club Captain who schemes and plots for her husband to President of the club but for no real end. He could be the dumb star player who likes the idea of being President and is egged on, but only knows how to play on the field. So in the middle of the AGM he tackles the existing President and takes him out of the game, and then takes on the rest of the club in the same way till they finally take him out.

So set these sort of people in a time when war and murder are all around them, and they can seize the throne, and Macbeth is what you get.

The book of 'coarse acting' talks about how many actresses are interested in having pretty dresses for their part whether they dresses are appropriate for the role or not. I've come to the conclusion that Lady Macbeth is paying the price for all the other crap women's parts in Shakespeare so everyone who gets the role is determined to mine it for strength. It's not to say that Lady Macbeth can't be strong and dominating in an interpretation, but that is always how she is played.

No I'm not wanting to set the play in a rugby club, nor dumb down both the characters, but it seems to me that to have 'ill-fitting' garments they both need to be clearly unskilled to be monarchs. Yet they are always played as great heroic figures rather than limited people who get way out of their depth by temporarily upsetting the natural order.

Another issues I see is that every teacher I have heard going on about Macbeth has come back to 'vaulting ambition' that leads to Macbeth's downfall. I see equally he has fallen into bad company... his wife and those witches at least egging him on. If the script is really a lot about magic 'the charm's wound up' isn't he also in part in a thrall? It seems to me all the productions and all but one of the films seems to gloss over this aspect and confine the witches to theatrical fortune tellers.
The terror of the production is about the fact this magic exists it's demonic and people under spells become blood-crazed murderers.

If you play him this way Macbeth can be a great intelligent warrior who wakes up after the deed is done and it's to late.

Anyway these are some of the issues that I want to address as the play is worked through. Who knows I may end up with 3 crones, a very strong Lady Macbeth and Macbeth himself as a strapping clearly royal figure?

In terms of performance if there is no hero - it's not good theatre. The tension I see is balancing real characters and making them compelling in an atmosphere where magic and murder are commonplace.

Foul is foul

Torrential rain is forecast. Appropriately I'm going through the Macbeth Script and history to look for insights into the production.

The central problem today is reducing the script to 90 minutes. The complication is I don't know how long it is now. I've been hunting for estimated lengths. I do know I've seen two productions well over 2 hours.

Anyway back to the start.
I have always been fascinated by the Scottish Play. At drama classes when I was 12 we did sections of it. I studied it at school and university, I've seen many movie versions. I've paradied the play in essays and letters.

Three things prompted me to seek to direct the play now:
1 I was writing a play for a cafe and I wanted to turn the waitresses into the 3 witches.
2 My father died.
3 I was watching a play at a theatre that would lend itself to a production of it.

That theatre company had no slots till 2009 but Elmwood players did have a slot and when I went to suggest a comedy to them, I mentioned what I really wanted to do at some point was the Scottish Play.

And so 2 months later here we are.

What is amazing is how quickly the script has taken over my conscious thoughts. Many decisions about the production have already gone in ways I wouldn't have expected.

My intention here is to follow these decisions and then the production as it takes shape. The few equivalent discussions I have found on the web have been fascinating and I want to link to some of the key ones as I go. I also think leaving our record may be of interest to others. Or not. The one issue I have is to not have spoilers here that may take away from the living production.

As I progress I would like to invite those involved in the production to join the blog and share their decisions and observations.