Matthew DeCoursey's Open Salon Blog

Cheek by Jowl: A Fine and Problematic Macbeth

Sat, 12 Mar 2011 21:03:52 -0500

This week, the famous British company Cheek by Jowl performed Macbeth in Hong Kong. I went to the show, to a workshop run by the company, and then to the show again. It is a great piece of theatre, even though it betrays the text.

The venue of the performance, the Lyric Theatre at the Hong Kong Academy of Performing Arts, is a cavernous place with two balconies and well over a thousand seats. Many times, I have gone to plays there and thought, “I enjoyed that, but I sure wish I could have seen it in a better theatre.” Cheek by Jowl dealt with the limitations of the venue very well. Their style of acting is whole-body physical, and the actors move extraordinarily well. People I respect complained that the blocking was too busy. It certainly was busy: in Act I Scene 7, Macbeth and Lady Macbeth chase each other across the stage in domestic-quarrel mode, seeming to say, “You stop right there! I have something to say to you!” I was fine with that, though. When you perform a warhorse like Macbeth, you need to do something to make it fresh, and the movement was so fluid, I thought it worked. And they have the most powerful voices I’ve ever encountered.

The scenes were made to interpenetrate. For example, at the end of Act I Scene 4, the stage is quite full of people. Duncan has just announced his effort to will the kingdom to his son, and then that he will stay in Macbeth’s castle that night. At the end of the scene, Macbeth hurries off to make the announcement to his wife, but all the rest of the cast freeze. Lady Macbeth enters reading his letter shortly before the freeze, when her name is mentioned, and she threads her way in through the frozen actors without seeing them. A moment comes when they all unfreeze and exit out of character. I found this powerful and exciting.

When the time comes to announce Duncan’s death, the actor playing Duncan enters and plants himself centre stage. The tributes to Duncan that ensue are oriented around the actor. That worked, and brought a centre to the emotion of the moment. In Act V, after the sleepwalking scene, Lady Macbeth seats herself down centre. As Macbeth talks about her with the doctor, he looks into her face with his hand on her cheek or her neck. She is still there when Seyton enters to say, “The Queen, my lord, is dead.” She gets up and walks off, leaving Macbeth alone to do “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.” That was powerful.

Many of the other best moments were nonverbal. For me, the best one is at the end of the banquet scene in Act III. Macbeth has just been screaming in front of the nobles about his vision of Banquo’s ghost. Finally, Lady Macbeth tells them all to go away. The last one turns to say, “Better health attend his majesty.” And then there is a long, long pause as both move around, recovering from the trauma of the moment, until finally they sit down at opposite ends (apparently, as it is mimed) of a long table. That was theatrical magic.

The production departs from usual understandings of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. Lady Macbeth is not very steely. When she says “Fill me from the crown to the toe top-full of direst cruelty,” she seems to really need this, and the tension between her desire to be evil and her inherent fragility seems to be driving her mad from the beginning of the show. Macbeth does not seem to have either the vaulting ambition or the tender conscience of the character I have always imagined. He is involved with an interaction with Lady Macbeth without any deep inner conflict of his own.

When I first saw the play, I came away feeling happy and excited about the production, as my two companions did, too. At the same time, I expressed reservations about the characterization. I didn’t find it possible to believe that the character of Macbeth I saw on the stage would be capable of massacring entire families to suit his ambition. I had a lesser problem with Lady Macbeth–lesser, because she is not required to become a political mass murderer. The murder of Duncan is the only one she is involved with, so it is less of a problem if she can only just barely manage that one.

At the workshop, the associate director asked us for questions about the production. Someone asked about the characterization of Lady Macbeth. He said that in the conception of the company, the Macbeths commit the murder for each other. That is to say that Macbeth has little or no vaulting ambition of his own, but he wants to give the gift of the monarchy to his wife, and it is the same in reverse for her.

When I saw the show again, that made sense of much of what they did. In Act I scene 7, Macbeth of course announces ,“we shall proceed no further in this business.” Lady Macbeth first becomes scornful of his manhood, as the text demands, but having done that, she crosses down left, sits down and begins to cry. Macbeth slowly crosses the stage, puts a hand on her shoulder, and finally agrees to do it. The presence of Lady Macbeth on the stage with Macbeth in Act V also makes more sense then, and her death is made to be more of a major event in the plot than the text suggests. Just before the banquet scene in Act III, the two dance together, lovingly, as the court claps and then dances with them.

I don’t want to suggest that they failed to present some conception of the play that I perceive as “Shakespeare’s intention” or any such nonsense. I do want to point out, though, that this interpretation softens many parts of the text that carry a lot of drama because of their hardness. Lady Macbeth is the most misogynistic character in Shakespeare. Her speeches carry a total, unequivocal contempt for women, and she has contempt for women exactly because they have “the milk of human kindness.” If she becomes a fond if misguided wife, there is no place for that very hard Lady Macbeth in the play. That means that the motivation for her insanity in the sleepwalking scene is far less clear, less dramatic. Macbeth, for his part, clearly and explicitly condemns himself to Hell, and it is also clear and explicit that he does this because of his own ambition for himself. That hard and personal ambition carries much of the plot from the banquet onwards. In Cheek by Jowl’s interpretation, he needed to kill Banquo, Macduff’s family, and many unnamed others out of love for Lady Macbeth. This would need development in a coherent play. He would need dialogue with, or monologues about, Lady Macbeth to show how this political ruthlessness arises out of that love. The words of his enemies about his tyrannical, treacherous, murderous qualities would need to contrast effectively with his tenderness toward his wife. None of this happens, because the text offers no opportunity for any of this to happen. To do a complete job of what they were trying to do, they would need to rewrite parts of the play.

The production was fresh, and that is an achievement with a play like this. I counted up, and this is the seventh production of Macbeth I have seen, including the one I directed, but not including films. I am prepared to accept imperfection in one area because of something striking in another. An excellent production that betrayed the text.

My bitter youth: Two dialogues

Sat, 1 Jan 2011 22:01:45 -0500

Me: Let’s get to know each other.

They: Men are from Mars.

Me: Meaning what?

They: You just mean you only want to get laid.

Me: Not only. I want to know you.

They: Men are from Mars.

Me: I’m not from Mars. I’m just a person like you.

They: Men are from Mars.

Then there was the feminist twist.

They: Men are from Mars.

Me: No, we’re not. We’re just people like you.

They (bitter laugh): Men are from Mars. Don’t look at the pictures in Playboy.

Me: Why not?

They: They make you be from Mars.

Me: But I’m not from Mars.

They (bitter laugh): Men are from Mars.

Crisis of the Humanities: Justifying the Study of Literature

Sun, 24 Oct 2010 21:10:32 -0400

There’s no denying it. There are fair questions to ask about the study of literature. Other fields can say, we found a vaccine for polio; we have found more resistant strains of wheat; we can build bridges and make planes fly. What can we say? Nothing of that kind. And it is certainly possible to make the study of literature into the pursuit of trivia. Is it relevant to the person on the street whether certain editions of Shakespeare are from his “foul papers” and others seem to be from prompt books? (This last question seems to me intensely interesting, but I understand if you don’t think so.) The subject matter of literary studies, at least in part, is accessible to anyone who can read. If the person on the street enjoys Dick Francis novels, that enjoyment implies an interest in literature, but it may be hard to see how the professional academic in literary studies contributes to the enjoyment of the individual. Even if the academic does contribute to the reader’s enjoyment (as is possible), does it matter, compared to finding a cure for cancer? In a competition for resources, why should we in literary studies have any credibility at all?

The field has a distinguished history of intellectual leadership among other fields, on more than one level. Among academics, we see literary-trained people like Mikhail Bakhtin and Lev Vygotsky forming the basis of theory in a wide variety of fields. Vygotsky is among the dominant forces in educational psychology today, even though he died in 1934. Vygotsky was trained in literature and turned to psychology in his mid-twenties. Bakhtin is even more dominant in a wider range of fields, and is the more remarkable because he never stopped being a literary scholar: his books have titles like Problems of Dostoyevsky`s Poetics. I`m not at all sure he knew his work had the potential for such wide influence as it has. Search “Mikhail Bakhtin” in Google Scholar, and you will get over 30,000 hits, extending into all areas of social science and humanities, and even as far as medicine (Poirier and Brauner, The Voices of the Medical Record, but this is just the first one to come up).

Literary scholars have also been important to the public at large. In terms of our views of gender, who is more important than Germaine Greer? She did her PhD on Elizabethan drama, and has published a book on Shakespeare. Further, if you read The Female Eunuch with this in mind, you will see that this intellectual formation had a deep influence on her.

What about the literary critic Marshall McLuhan and communications? Then there are the philosophers with special preoccupation with the problems of literature: Hans-Georg Gadamer, Simone de Beauvoir, Michel Foucault, Paul Ricoeur. Jacques Derrida, too, though it seems to me his star has fallen so far that all four I have listed are more influential than he is.

But should governments support the professional study of literature on the off-chance of producing an academic star?

Last May I went to a conference called “Narrative Matters” in Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada. It was an interesting experience for a literary scholar, to be in a place filled with social scientists arguing vehemently for the need to overcome the limitations of statistical and experimental methods. Looking through the papers, the two largest groups were psychologists and medical professionals, often nurses. There were some literary scholars, like Elizabeth McKim, who works with the gerontologist William Randall on helping older people make sense of their lives through narrative. The social scientists who use these “qualitative” methods are not always aware of the roots of their approach in literary studies. Many things are obscured, but one thing is very clear: these social scientists are like humanities scholars in that they value richness of meaning over mathematical demonstration. Literary study matters not only at the star level, but also at the level of the working scholar.

I think the importance of literary studies to other disciplines waxes and wanes over time, and I am not aware that much recent work on literature is very important to anyone else, even as older work exerts a powerful influence. It is partly because current work is not widely influential that literary studies are under attack in the Western world.

Here in Hong Kong, the situation is very different. I work in the department of English of the Hong Kong Institute of Education. When the department hired me six years ago, I was the first person ever to be hired into it for the purpose of teaching literature. My colleagues were then, and are now, largely applied linguists. Now there are four specialists in literature, and one more who teaches primarily literature, though his research field is literacy. Hong Kong has a long history of simplistic “practicality” in its approach to education, trying to train its pupils to do what must be done, i.e. make money. This is good for getting a high ranking on surveys of basic skills like the PISA studies, but bad for rounded education. The Hong Kong system has been extraordinarily bad at encouraging extensive reading, and this is one of the things that the study of literature is good for.

I don’t know just how, but it has become the received wisdom in Hong Kong education that new language teachers should know literature, and (even more) drama. For the first time last year, a student told me she had gone for her interview, and the principal asked her, “What novels have you read?” And, she said, all I could say was Jane Eyre, because I read it for your class.

I think that if literary studies is to maintain a significant place in the Western world, its advocates must emphasize two things: its important place among academic disciplines in terms of intellectual leadership; and its role in developing education.

Park 51 and the Experience of Emotion

Sat, 11 Sep 2010 22:09:00 -0400

The current fuss over the Park 51 project leads me to think about emotion and rationality. Really big emotional events like 9/11 can be hard to think through, so I want to think in principle about emotion and rationality through something much more everyday, and then turn to the big problem.

When I have an important appointment, it often turns out to be high up in a tall building. Say the twentieth floor. I may be late for an important appointment, and may rush into the elevator in a panic. Other people get on with me, and many of them are headed to floors before mine. They anger me. Sometimes, someone gets on at the third floor and gets off at the fifth. I think this person shows poor moral character in refusing to walk up two floors. Indeed, when I survey my fellow elevator passengers, I see that every one of them is a moral degenerate, barring those whose floor is above mine.

If my appointment is very important and I am very late, this feeling may be strong.

Fortunately, I am also able to think about the situation. I see quite well that some may have appointments just as important as mine, and may be just as late. Even if their appointments are perfectly routine and they are early, they still have a right to use this elevator to serve their purposes just as I am serving mine. What do I want, a kind of triage of urgency in the elevator lobby?

The rationality of my thoughts creates feelings, too, and I do the reasonable thing, I calm down. I wait my turn.

The current fuss in the States over the “Ground Zero Mosque” makes me think about the experience of the elevator. People were traumatized nine years ago with 9/11. They have raw emotions. When an irritant appears, they can get very upset, and their emotion is understandable.

Rationality still matters, though. The emotion connected with death is much greater, but that only increases the need for rationality. The stakes are higher.

The “Ground Zero Mosque” is only an irritant for as long as you think that the Muslim world attacked the United States nine years ago. Given the statements made by the attackers, this is a reasonable starting point. Yet everyone knows that 1.2 billion people were not involved in that attack, and anyone who has paid attention knows that it was widely and roundly condemned by Muslim religious leaders in many parts of the world.

The attackers presented themselves as representatives of true, pure Islam. Their effectiveness depends on people swallowing that story, fantastic though it is.

Those who don’t want to see the community centre built at Park 51 are swallowing that story. If Islam as a whole is guiltless in the attack, there is no reason to resist the project. If Al-Qaeda represents true, pure Islam, then there is every reason.

Rationality should tell people that they ought not to support the second story. They should believe what common sense tells them: that it is not possible for Islam as a whole to be responsible for the attack. If they take the second view on board, then they are damaging the position of their country with respect to a huge number of people in the world, and giving a gift to Al-Qaeda.

Anyone who cares about the United States will support the building of the Park 51 complex right where it is. I think anyone who opposes it lacks patriotism.

When I see the statements made by Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich, I would really like to be optimistic, see the best in them. The most generous possible view is that they have the maturity of five-year-olds having a fit, and they genuinely see the situation as they say they see it. The darker view is that they are manipulating the situation for political gain, in the awareness that they are damaging the country by doing so.

I was living in Istanbul nine years ago, working for Koç University. I first heard about 9/11 from my American neighbour in faculty housing. I watched it happen on his TV. My Turkish colleagues were shocked. Many people talked about visits to New York, about buying theatre tickets at the half-price ticket booth in the World Trade Centre. Flags were at half-mast all over Istanbul.

Orhan Pamuk wrote about the experience, too, in the New York Review of Books. He wrote about his own experience as an educated Turk, as a former resident of New York, but also about his less cosmopolitan neighbours in Istanbul who had more mixed feelings. Some Turks, apparently responded with the same ungenerous emotion as many Americans are showing now.

My Hong Kong I

Fri, 20 Aug 2010 20:08:20 -0400

My Hong Kong is first of all a village. I live on the second floor of what is called a "village house" in a tiny place called Tung Tsz (Dung Dzhee), east of Tai Po in the New Territories. This is the view from my roof terrace:

The building in the distance is where I work, the Hong Kong Institute of Education.

Most people in the village have dogs. In many cases, that's why they live here. You can walk your dog off the leash.

There are tombs along the paths, where people come on Tomb Sweeping Day to make offerings to ancestors.

There's a minibus that I take to work, or to go into Hong Kong.

Here's the view from the Institute of Education over Tolo Harbour:

Ten minutes away is the suburb of Tai Po, a city of some 300,000 people. It doesn't seem that big because most people live in highrises, and they do pack them in.

Hong Kong is built on a very clear principle: stack the people high, and leave a lot of green space. 85% of Hong Kong is green space. The biggest environmental issue is air pollution, as you see here.

So I live in a tiny village on the edge of one of the world's great cities. What could be better?