Macbeth

How we choose what to watch in a situation where we are less constrained by current seasons, our availability to attend them, and broadcast schedules should be a key consideration of a publication on Shakespeare in lockdown. I mean by this that back catalogues of theatres streaming their works cut across the years; some productions are available online for the foreseeable future (legitimately or bootlegged on video-sharing platforms), while others are limited to a day or week; and a Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) production shown as part of the BBC’s evening scheduling can be watched at the viewer’s convenience for several months on iPlayer. So, I want to start this review by outlining features of lockdown that have certainly played a part in my own Shakespeare viewing during it. One of the things about lockdown, at least in an academic household without dependants, is that you need actively to counter an impulse to fill the social void with more work. With this in mind, my first lockdown theatre-viewing was non-Shakespeare. Another feature of lockdown is the (unintentional) peer pressure, at least on social media, to be productive, whether in a work capacity or through baking, gardening, crafts, art, and exercise. I am susceptible to this, so when I came to choose some Shakespearean theatre to review in lockdown, I wanted to write on something Vietnamese to contextualise another article on Southeast Asian Shakespeare – multitasking. Judy Celine Ick has drawn attention to the neglect of Southeast Asian Shakespeare in Asian Shakespeare studies. There are not many full-length Vietnamese productions available on websites like MIT Global Shakespeare and Asian Shakespeare Intercultural Archive (ASIA).

The obvious choice was the one production from Vietnam on ASIA, the Vietnam Youth Theatre’s Macbeth, first staged in 2002, again in 2008 (when the DVD recording I watched on ASIA was made). In lockdown, I am enjoying using personal connections to help me choose everything from which online yoga classes to take to what theatre to stream. The online echo-chamber has clearly not been killed off by coronavirus. Rather, for me, the recommendations of like-minded friends and colleagues provide ways to navigate, and motivation to engage with, a glut of streamable Shakespeare. For example, a friend might organise an online ‘watch party’, setting a common time to view, with the promise of interaction between viewers via online discussion. I was curious about this Macbeth, since the eponymous character is played by Anh Tú (also the Assistant Director of the show). I met him when I travelled to Hanoi on research mobility funding in 2016 and he spoke with relish about this role. I had been sightseeing at the grand, French colonial, Hanoi opera house where the production was filmed. Watching this production allowed me to revisit people and places that I will likely not see again in person for the foreseeable future.

The script was edited from a previous translation of the play into Vietnamese, with some imagery rather changed. For instance, ‘our fate, hid in an auger hole’ (2.3.119) becomes ‘our fate, like a fish on a chopping board’. The names of characters have been given Vietnamese equivalents in the script, although the English subtitles (created for ASIA by Nguyen Ha Nguyen, I think) retain their originals: Macbeth becomes Mác Bét; Malcolm, Man Côm; Lennox, Len Noc; and so on. On the editor’s part, an evident cut was the porter scene, while some scenes were entirely rewritten. For example, Ross’s visit to Lady Macduff (Minh Hàng) was replaced by a farewell scene with her husband. Their exchange heightened the sentimentality of the scene with Lady Macduff asking ‘who will teach our son to ride a horse?’ Macduff (Xuân Tùng) answered ‘If I survive I will teach him when I return’, before Lady Macduff instructed her son to embrace his father for the last time. Scotland was retained as the nominal setting, although there was no attempt to materialise Scottishness. Rather, non-culture-specific towering columns and flights of steps lead up to three drums swathed in red cloth, used mainly by the witches. Variation was provided by red and blue lighting to illuminate bloodshed and supernatural activity. Music in the production was drawn from diverse cultures and periods: Bruckner’s Symphony no. 8 was incorporated into the soundtrack to connote ‘majesty’, although most viewers are more likely to recognise the music that punctuates the performance from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: Space Odyssey: Richard Strauss’s symphonic poem ‘Also sprach Zarathustra’. Elsewhere, Tudor strings and trumpet mix with a melancholy two-string fiddle, the đàn nhị, for Malcolm’s (Bùi Nhu’ Lai) bereavement; choric singing, hát de; musical theatre, chèo – details about local instruments and musical forms can be gleaned from the ASIA notes.

The production had four, rather than three, witches. They began the play in white dresses, plain except for sequins sewn on the chest. Worn with platinum blond wigs and prominent silver eyeshadow, I couldn’t quite banish the spectre of ABBA’s Agnetha Fältskog from my mind until these witches changed into dull black robes after the Macduff murders. Royals wore yellow robes as per regional tradition, while women and soldiers donned outfits that were ambiguous but could be read as inflected with both traditional Vietnamese and medieval European dress. The ASIA notes suggest that this non-specificity was intended to elude attempts to pin the production down to a particular time or place. The witches’ dancing, chanting, and the raising of a foetus, jointed like a rabbit for the pot, from an urn, conveyed a sense of supernatural witchiness. However, it was not until I read the ASIA notes that I understood these witches drew specifically on shamanism. Intermittently, they produced a quiet cackling (something also taken up by the Macbeths, the further they mired themselves in murder), and an echo was consistently applied to their voices. Another recurrent feature of their staging was the use of fabric – sheets of various colours with which they would conjure up or cover up characters – including long red scarves for streams of blood. Duncan’s (An Ninh) corpse was ‘discovered’ for the audience by the witches, suspended vertically by such scarves. Using the vertical to display the corpse echoed their earlier conjuration of an infant shape, foreshadowed the upright tableaux of the Macduff family’s killing, and the suspension of Macbeth’s spear-pierced throne mid-air in the closing scene. It seemed to reinforce the ‘supernatural soliciting’ of these deaths, even if they were enacted by mortal characters.

This production notably asserted that the Macbeths are parents of children still living. The subtitles show Lady Macbeth (Nguyễn Lan Hu’o’ng) rallying her husband with the words ‘we have children’, before continuing with the more normatively translated ‘I have given suck’ lines. Lady Macbeth’s ‘maternal instinct’ was developed to explain her demise. She witnessed the murder of the Macduff family, apologised profusely to their corpses – clearly distressed by the sight of the dead women and children, of ‘too much blood again’, as the subtitles read. The beginning of her deterioration was already intimated by her appearance at the scene in a simple shift. However, moving immediately from her witnessing the slaughter to the handwashing scene suggested that the killing of Macduff’s family irretrievably accelerated her decline. The handwashing scene was beautifully choreographed as, caught up in a red scarf, she engaged in a protracted tug of war with the witches until she strangled herself in it. That she lost this fight said less about any weakness on her part, but rather more about the power the witches exert in this production. Their presence is very real, rather than a figment of the Macbeths’ imagination, and they are onstage for much of the play. It is fitting that Lady Macbeth’s visually captivating final struggle, perishing like a fly caught in the witches’ web, was followed by Anh Tú’s most feeling, and consequently, most moving speech as Macbeth. The audience spontaneously applauded before his concluding battle with Macduff.

The production ended, not with Macbeth’s corpse on the stage, but with the witches chanting ‘Where is your hope? Where is your desire? How far is your desire for the country?’ as they peered into the air at his empty, broken, throne. They were not the only ones straining to see. I was unable to make the screen full-size, even after I got rid of ASIA’s notepad function (which allows you not just to write, but also share time-coded, notes: perfect for the extroverted isolated!) Yet, this frustration needs to be offset against ASIA’s helpful production data that here explain connections to ‘traditional Vietnamese folk culture’ and symbolic use of colour, as well as its provision of subtitles, relevant theatre criticism, reviews, blog posts, and press articles.