All the world’s a stage, but some plays get a lot more performances on it than others. Macbeth is one of those shows that, at any given moment, it seems more likely than not is being performed on some stage, somewhere around the world. How can you possibly breathe new life into yet another production?
In Stratford-upon-Avon, the RSC is trying many things that make their production of Macbeth stand out, from the constant presence of the porter to a thematic emphasis on time to a design aesthetic that looks and sounds like it came out of a 1960s horror film. The presence of these elements creates a compellingly eerie production while also serving to highlight the absence of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth’s child, whose constant specter haunts the performance and brings a subtler touch of horror to the stage.
This is a ghost not often seen in Macbeth. Indeed, it is a ghost whose presence is only ever alluded to in Shakespeare’s text. But in Polly Findlay’s Macbeth, the trauma of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth’s missing child is brought to the surface through a variety of production choices, beginning with the casting of the witches as children, clad in pink footie pajamas and carrying baby dolls. The reason why children would so haunt Macbeth doesn’t become clear until several scenes later, when Lady Macbeth breaks down in tears in his lap over his declaration that she should “bring forth men-children only,” and it becomes painfully apparent that these two characters have suffered some sort of grief surrounding their children. The absence of any children in their household is further emphasized by shared moments with other characters’ children, including Macbeth’s jovial interactions with Fleance before he turns around and gives the order for his death and Lady Macbeth hearing the recording of the Macduff children’s murder before her descent into madness (and possibly seeing it as well, though the sightlines of the theatre made it difficult to tell what exactly was going on), thereby seeming to imply the cause of it. In Macbeth’s final nightmarish moments before his battle with Macduff, several horror-film-esque tableaus of children also serve to reinforce Macbeth’s grief and terror about his lack of children.
Before this production, I hadn’t really thought of Macbeth as a story about children. Ambition, yes, greed, yes, the cyclical nature of violence, yes. But Macbeth does also have two of the most well-known children of Shakespeare’s works—Young Duff and Fleance. Young Duff doesn’t stand out so much in Polly Findlay’s Macbeth, but the final image of Fleance standing before Malcolm as the Violence Timer resets itself does make us realize that the unwritten future of this story lies in the choices of children. Banquo’s children will be kings, eventually, somehow. Most likely through more violence—it’s what they’ll learn from their parents, after all, and they will keep the wheel of violence turning as they were taught to do, begetting more violence with each generation.
And then there is the unwritten ghost, the unknown specter of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth’s child in which Niamh Cusack’s Lady Macbeth seemed to root so many of her choices. What happened to this child? Did it ever really exist in the first place? We don’t know. We don’t need to know. If we did, Shakespeare presumably would have said something about it, and Polly Findlay gives us no further answers to these questions. What matters is the child’s absence, and that absence is something I believe the RSC did an excellent job of portraying, and in doing so gave us a deeper glimpse into the humanity of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth.
In a world full of noise and action and chaos, moments of stillness stand out all the more. In this production, where the clock was quite literally ticking, the image of Lady Macbeth frozen with grief on the ground in her husband’s arms at the mention of children is one of the more heart-wrenching moments of the show and one that will certainly stay with me.
