LIP THEATRE COMPANY, DUNDEE,
PRESENTS
'MACBETH'
Used to be that I trod the boards, strutting and fretting my brief hour upon the stage, years back. And I have all those starry moments recorded in yellowing newspaper clippings and photographs that I keep in a book, and yesterday I watched from the dark of the auditorium my youngest son take his place in the limelight.
Lip Theatre Company's production of 'Macbeth', a modern adaption, began with witches greeting the audience at the ill-lit door - white and ghoulish and menacing, fixing us with their black stares and standing in our way, and standing too close for comfort, daring us to walk through them. And we walked around them, feeling threat and unease. But they followed us like heartless creeping shadows and they glared at us till we took our seats.
Then storms rolling and the fires of hell and somewhere the noise of bloody battle. Out of this cacophony stepped a victor and a hero, and his name was Macbeth, and he is in truth my son, and a father is lifted high on the shoulders of pride then. And my son suddenly has a wife, a wicked wife, and I do not doubt but that she knows my son, for she says he is a man filled up with 'the milk of human kindness', and he is - that's my son.
But soon enough there's blood on his hands, a King's blood, and Macbeth is changed from who he is; and Banquo who he loved and we loved, too, he is dead by my son's orders. Then is Macbeth like an animal trapped and he snarls at those he should hold dear, and he is brutish and mad, and I don't recognise that son of mine.
And the witches, like a greek chorus, are wicked and teasing-cruel. And the players play their parts, and there are entrances and exits, and Macbeth grows more and more deserving of his fate. And Birnam Wood will march on Dunsinane and for a moment we all wish Macbeth dead - and I am this man's father!
But then he speaks to us direct, the silver light and all our attention on him, and 'Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow', and 'all our yesterdays', and he briefly mourns the death of his wife and sees his life as a strutting thing that signifies nothing. Macbeth weeps, and something in me breaks, and I know 'blood will have blood', but he shines as saints shine, and he is my son again.
Macbeth rants at a wood that does indeed appear to march towards Dunsinane, then against a man not born of woman but 'untimely ripped' from his mother's womb. And off stage he dies a tyrant's death and a new King stands tall and the world is put in order once again and Scotland shall be better served hereafter. But in the audience a father quietly asks for his son back again.
Credit for this student production should go to the producer, Koren Heydon-Dumbleton, and a thing more strange is that Koren is a former pupil of mine. Afterwards, I say she should be pleased with what she has done, and she tells me I should be proud of my son and she says how she was nightly mesmerised by him. And I am proud, of him and of her.
And it is over now - all sound and fury and signifying nothing… but I don't believe Shakespeare really believed that line, and I know I don't.
