Is This a Dagger?

From reading my blog it can be surmised that I thoroughly love Shakespeare. I have spent many years of my life reading his plays and writing about them. Something about how the plots were constructed and the stories have always appealed to me. I like some plays more than others but they are all very interesting in their own way. 

On occasion I get to see performances as well.  I always love how directors rethink the stories to retell them in a more modern way – making them more relevant to present day audiences. Last week I went to see “MacBeth” by the Royal Theatre of Scotland. The actor Alan Cumming played almost every role in the play and it left me speechless in many ways. 

The beginning of the play sets up the idea that we are in a mental asylum via the stark environment and the beds and clinical items around the stage. We watch as two characters silently admit Alan Cumming into the asylum. As the play continues, Alan begins to speak the parts of the various characters and he delineates the different roles by standing in different places or holding different object or by changing the way he wears certain clothes. This continues to the end and culminates in the tragic ending of the Shakespearean play. 

There were a few funny moments based on Cumming’s interpretation of some of the characters but other than that, it was an intense and tiring show. Watching him popping back and forth between different characters and his frenetic energy during the portrayals kept me on the edge of my seat for most of the production. This was probably one of my favorite interpretations of a Shakespeare play because it captured the tension as well as the speed with which the action unravels of the original play. The play had no intermission and was just short of two hours long. 

Mesmerizing portrayals of fascinating characters always make watching a play enjoyable. When one person does all those portrayals you have to be in awe of their talent and interpretation, not to mention their stamina. Too bad this play had such a short run. Otherwise I would tell everyone I knew to go and see it and be as surprised and entranced as I was.