Let Us Know We are Steeped in Blood: Macbeth and Ourselves as Documents of Barbarism

I’ve seen a fair amount of Macbeth in the last few months. I finally got around to seeing Throne of Blood, I followed this up with the Trevor Nunn Macbeth (with Judi Dench and Ian McKellen), then I saw–this is sounding a bit like an apocalypse, no?–the Verdi Macbeth at the Metropolitan Opera (see the photo to the left), and, just yesterday, I saw an excellent and scary * Macbeth at BAM with Patrick Stewart (who’s surprisingly spry and quick for someone who’s very nearly 70 years old).

Barring the Kurosawa, all my recent Macbeths occur in a militarized Europe c. 1925-1955. While none is quite so strenuously and particularly set in this milieu as the 1995 Richard III film, while the Nunn is set so minimally that I’d hesitate to identify it as anything but Macbeth, and while the Metropolitan Opera has certain features from the Balkans of the 90s, all nonetheless have in common men with slick-backed hair, jackboots, khaki, and, depending on the production, jodhpurs, assault rifles and pistols, camouflage, and, for the women, evening gowns cut from the 30s.

With all the power at my disposal, which is to say: none, I declare this particular setting a cliché and thus call for a moratorium. Set your Macbeths elsewhere please. Let them be set in Abu Ghraib, perhaps, with Macbeth or better yet the weird sisters played by German Shepherds; let them be set in a hamburger stand in Pennsylvania; let them be set in academia, on the steppes, in the hallways of KBR or Blackwater, at Balad AFB, but please avoid setting them in postcolonial sub-Saharan Africa.

It’s why this cliché is a cliché that demands it be verboten. The setting’s an easy out; it’s the theatrical equivalent of a Godwin’s Law violation; it appeals to our sense of self-satisfaction and relief at not being fascists, totalitarians, or victims and/or apparatchiks of such regimes. I might call this setting the opposite of Brecht’s alienation device: it’s a satisfaction device. We recognize Macbeth‘s horror elsewhere, not in or with ourselves; through this, we attain the self-satisfaction of the original English audiences, pleased to see the rough Scots finally transformed from Thanes into Earls (“My thanes and kinsmen, / Henceforce be earls, the first that ever Scotland / In such an honor nam’d” V.ix.28-30). If not Democracy, then benevolence has come, with the repulsive, oleaginous Malcolm as the voice of our better conscience. How, then, to accuse us of the horror? How to brush ourselves against the grain with Macbeth?

* Excellent and scary except for the embarrassing industrial-techno-chant of the witches cauldron speech, which sounded like muddled, low-grade Test Dept. or Laibach.