Cymbeline (August 2) and Macbeth (August 3, 2019)

The Great River Shakespeare Company, a summer festival troupe in Winona, Minnesota, presented productions of Cymbeline and Macbeth on its 2019 closing weekend, Friday evening and Saturday matinee, at the Vivian Fussillo Theater at Winona State University.  These shows were part of the 16th season for Great River Shakespeare Festival.  In both instances, the plays were competently acted and ingeniously staged.  The mostly young company performed with zeal to audiences that must have seemed disappointingly small to the players.  I found much admirable in the presentation of these plays and little to criticize -- the acting is somewhat inconsistent, ranging from impassioned and excellent to merely tolerable. The sets and costumes were generally drab, although serviceable enough.  Shakespeare generally has to be edited to be performed -- in Cymbeline, the unstageworthy stuff involving a tablet deposited on the breast of the sleeping Posthumus was mercifully omitted; a few of the apparitions were excised from Macbeth and the witch's lines about seasoning their potion with the"hand of a blaspheming Jew" and the thick lips of "a Turk" were redacted.  But, by and large, the audience was served with Shakespeare, more or less, uncut together with large doses of Shakespeare's bombastic and bizarre gibberish, his weird circumlocutions for simple concepts and his ornate formulations that mean more than the ear can possibly decipher.  On occasion, the lighting faltered.  Whoever was operating the spotlight aimed at the principals in Cymbeline seems to have fallen asleep for a couple of scenes -- the actors were shrouded in darkness while the focused beam of the spotlight aimlessly lit a few yards of the stage adjacent to them.

Cymbeline is a daunting production and intimidating to even professional repertory companies.  The play is long and vastly intricate with more plots and subplots than can be productively described.  Set in a fairytale England around the date of Jesus' birth, the play involves a pointless dispute between Britain and Rome in which both sides posture at length and, then, end up reaching an accord and satisfaction that renders all their earlier bellicose speechifying meaningless -- medieval kingdoms always sought to establish their roots in ancient Rome (hence, the Holy Roman Empire, as our professors used to say:  neither holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire) .  Similarly, the English during the renaissance seem to have felt it necessary to wed the ancient peoples indigenous to the isle to the Caesars, hence, the rather vapid subplot about whether the English mythological king, Cymbeline, refuses to bend the knee to pay tribute to Imperial Rome.  This subplot is merely incidental to a complex series of improbable, if romantic, misadventures involving members of Cymbeline's family:  his wife, the Queen, is a wicked stepmother who seeks to poison the King's natural daughter Imogen.  (I'm not sure she wants to poison Imogen or Imogen's husband, the dimwitted Posthumus, who spends most of the play mercifully off-stage and in exile, inexplicably changing sides several times in the conflict between the Britons and Romans.)  There's a "yellow" (swarthy) Italian Iachimo who tries to seduce Imogen -- it's a typical Cosi fan tutti wager on the chastity of Imogen, so wicked in tenor that the bet compromises the moronic Posthumus so severely that he's implausible as a hero thereafter..  (To the extent that there's a hero it's the forthright, enterprising, chaste and loyal Imogen.)  The evil stepmother's son, the cloddish Cloten, plans to rape Imogen.  But, after dressing up in Posthumus clothing (for reasons that make no sense), he gets his head chopped off by one of Cymbeline's two sons, twenty-year old princelings who were kidnapped by a "mountaineer" Belisarius, and raised as his own children.  Waking up next to the headless corpse of Cloten, dressed as Posthumus, Imogen immediately concludes that her husband is dead and, so, she dresses as a man, and, after spending some time in disguise as the saucy and waggish Fidele, encounters her two actual brothers supping on venison in Belisarius' cave. (I have the sequence of these events out of order, but you get the general gist.)  A sort of spasmodic skirmish between the Brits and the Romans brings Cymbeline into the field.  Posthumus is captured, about to be hanged, but, then, ends up with all the characters on stage for the final enormous scene, said by one Victorian critic, to resolve as many as 24 plots in one uninterrupted action presented across about the same number of pages.   By a reasonable count, the final scene resolves about 9 or 10 simultaneous narratives and ends with everyone happily reunited, the bad folks (Cloten and the wicked Queen) decisively dead, the married couple restored to their joy, and Britain and Rome yoked in some kind of  blessed political wedlock.  It's ridiculous but, also, involving in its own abstract way and critics are always astonished that this snarl of absurd plots is actually quite stageworthy -- it may be easier to watch than to read.  That said, the full play is an exhausting experience -- the verse is dense and coagulated to the point of being almost stagnant;  some of the metaphors are so elaboarately developed that you can't keep track of the point while reading the text let alone as the performers stammer the poetry at you.

The play was presented on thrust stage with jagged-looking blades of metal blocking vantage across grim-looking horizon with a single great cloaked obelisk standing mute as a megalithic menhir in the background.  Flanking the stage were groups of audience members, useful to the actors who used these choirs of spectators as an audience to whom to declaim their lines -- a lot of the speech is ornate declamation, arias of poetry and its helpful to have the audience represented on-stage and present to be hectored by the actors; somehow, this enlivens the proceedings.  As Harold Bloom points out, much of the play seems bitter self-parody of Shakespeare's other works and, in fact, the play, often, operates to mirror itself in an overtly unflattering way.  The transcendentally beautiful verse "Fear no more", sung on the occasion of the double burial of the comatose Imogen and the beheaded Cloten is parodied by the gaoler who, about to hang, Leonatus Posthumus, tells him that his death will free him from tavern bills and other sordid debts, "fear no more the tavern reckoning", the gaoler merrily says.  Posthumus deranged misogynistic speech triggered by his belief that his wife has cuckolded him is mirrored by Imogen donning men's clothing and, then, being told by her page, Pisanio, how to act like a young man, that is, like a strutting, quarrelsome fool.  The theme of doubling, one character represented by someone similar but grotesquely caricatured, is mirrored by the production's casting -- the whole show, requiring upwards of thirty speaking parts, is performed by about ten actors, each of them playing two or more roles.  Most noteworthy is casting a handsome Black young man to play both Posthumus and Cloten,, revealing that, at heart, the two characters may be uncomfortably similar to one another -- Posthumus is merely earnest, dull, densely stupid when he bets on his wife's fidelity and hysterical when he learns that Imogen seems have cuckolded him.  Cloten acts like a pimp from an HBO show like The Wire or the The Deuce -- he wears sunglasses, has a loose-gaited strut, and has his shirt pulled open to show chains displayed around his throat.  It's a showy racist conception, a sort of modern minstrel blackface conception -- but the show gets away with it, I suppose, because of the enthusiastic, if offensive, mugging of the Black actor playing the part.  There are two theatrical coups:  in the convoluted finale, one of the actresses acts as if she's confused herself by the flurry of revelations and denoument and she shouts in alarm, then, darts to the side of the stage to get herself properly costumed for resolution of the next plot point on the list of things to be concluded before the curtain -- it's very funny and makes a point about the wildly implausible ending as well as the hazards and difficulties of staging the show with 10 actors when more than 30 are specified by the Bard.  Equally effective is a moment when mighty Jupiter is supposed to appear -- in the script dangling down from some kind of baroque stage-machine.  In this staging, an actor goes to the group of people seated on stage-left, apparently all of them spectators with their tickets in their pockets, selects a "ringer", a tiny, puny-looking woman who, then, mounts on high and with the use of a golden sash about 45 feet long speaks Jove's lines.  It's a spectacular and wholly unexpected solution to a problem that the play poses, particularly to modern audiences -- particularly startling because the woman tapped to play Jove is so petite and seemingly ineffectual:  the effect captures both the splendor of the conception and the fact that we moderns are not going to find this element of the play very convincing.  (The play's structure is remarkable -- the audience knows the truth about all of the secret identities and the web of relationships that power the play's plot has been dramatized for the spectator.  By contrast, all of the characters have only incomplete and partial knowledge of the true state of affairs.  The intricate final scene has the effect of restoring equilibrium to the play -- the knowledge imbalance, as it were, is corrected:  at last, the characters are made privy to what the audience knows -- that is, the characters come to understand what the audience already has been shown.  The play's resolution, therefore, has a double authority:  conflicts are resolved but, also, and, perhaps, more importantly the resolution of these conflicts involves a sort of gnosis.  That is, the characters can not be freed from their conflicts without coming to know what the audience already understands to be the case.  This is different from the construction of Shakespeare's other plays -- for instance, we don't know that Macduff is not born of woman until the same instant that Macbeth learns this fatal fact.)

Ultimately, Cymbeline with its headless corpse and vials full of poison is infected by death, this shown by the famous dirge that provides the most hair-raising and awesome poetry in a text crammed with poetic gems.  In the face of death, it seems pointless to heap more deaths on those already seen or intimated -- thus, the play's powerful themes of redemption and forgiveness.  Even the loathsome Iachimo, whose slander against Imogen has driven Posthumus temporarily insane and nearly cost Imogen her life on several occasions (he's an Iago figure, but trivialized) , is slapped on the wrist and forgiven.  The piling up corpses in tragedies is revealed as absurd and futile -- death after all is never really a solution nor a plot-point and this is what Cymbeline as a play dramatizes.  Accordingly, the romance is a good counterpoint to the frenzied and hyper-violent Macbeth -- the nihilistic Macbeth is tragedy reductio ad absurdam, a play that starts with butchery evolves through murder and massacre and simply ends in more slaughter, proving nothing other than that once we indulge in violence, we are so steeped in blood that it is better to simply play out the pattern of deadly homicide since it would be "tedious" to retreat through the torrent of gore.  Cymbeline demonstrates that the elements of tragedy demand forgiveness; Macbeth dramatizes both why tragedy is so compelling but also how the form can readily disintegrate into sheer nihilistic murder.  As such Cymbeline can be read as a corrective to the lethal darkness of Macbeth.

Macbeth is presented without the audience members on-stage, without proscenium on a thrust platform in front of what looks like an intricate iron jungle gym.  The fence-like metal balconies and stairs are equipped with racks on which numerous five-foot long 2 x 6 boards are hung -- these wooden pieces will be used to simulate Birnam Wood.  A pike with a scary-looking metal point dominates one side of the set -- this is where Macbeth's head will ultimately be impaled.  The three witches are on-stage throughout almost all of the action -- they play menials, servants, and murderers.  One of the witches is a man with dark black shadow haloing his eyes.  He also plays the part of the porter in the famous interlude of pitch black comedy in play's second act.  Very early in the action, we see the witches eavesdropping on conversations about the Thane of Cawdor -- this undercuts the notion that the "weird sisters" have prophetic knowledge.   Rather, they seem to be merely reporting on what they have learned by non-supernatural means.  The fact that the witches appear in every scene naturalizes them -- their dire presence is not occasional and extraordinary but rather continuous and unremarkable.  The things of darkness are omnipresent, simply a part of this nightmare landscape.

In an interesting way, Lady Macbeth and Macbeth are symmetrically defined characters:  Macbeth hesitates and scruples before killing Duncan, but, then, has no regrets thereafter -- once committed  to a course of action, he has no time for regrets.  Lady Macbeth, by contrast, has absolutely no hesitation in inciting her husband to murder the King -- in fact, she is wholly murderous from almost her second or third spoken line.  But, of course, she then suffers endless, disabling regret once she has incited Macbeth to murder.  Viewed across one trajectory of action, the play seems to be about scruples.  Macbeth has scruples but once he overcomes them, they vanish as if they were never present in the first place.  Lady Macbeth has no scruples until it is too late -- and, then, her conscience kills her.  The theme of scruples is explored thoroughly in a scene that always seems slightly extraneous, an interruption to the frenzied action but which I think is thematically central.  Young Malcolm is urged to take up arms against Macbeth  -- but the boy fears that if he becomes King he will devolve into some sort of homicidal maniac (or rapist) such as Macbeth has become.  He expresses enormous scruples and, in fact, declares himself unworthy of rule because of his latent tendencies toward lust and rapaciousness.  Then, in a puzzling exchange, a peripeteia, he reverses and nullifies everything he has just said.  The importance of this scene is that it demonstrates the essence of Macbeth's tyranny, a word used repeatedly in connection with the play's protagonist.  To be a tyrant is to allow your fantasies to become real -- to actualize what may only be dreams of lust or power.  Malcolm reveals himself tainted by violent and lecherous fantasies but avows that he will not succumb to them.  By contrast, the fantasy of absolute power that afflicts Macbeth is one that he can't resist and that he embodies by increasingly murderous and tyrannical acts.  In order to do evil, one must first imagine evil, that is fantasize evil -- this is the gist of the scene in which Macbeth hallucinates an imaginary dagger and, then, seizes it and is aghast that it is decorated with gouts of blood.  At the heart of tyranny is the fantasy that one can have anything, any pleasure, that one desires.  But what does Macbeth desire?  Ultimately just more violence and more murder.  Clearly, Macbeth harbors murder in his heart from the outset -- he disembowels an enemy from "the nave to the chops" and the slaughter on the field of battle is likened to the crucifixion at Golgotha.  The moment the witches prophesy that he shall be king, Macbeth's mind leaps to the murders necessary to accomplish that oracle -- his mind doesn't rest on the privileges and pleasures of being King (he's not a policy wonk); rather, he immediately fixates on the homicides that he will have to commit to seize the throne.

Macbeth's power lies in its apparent realism, notwithstanding all the supernatural machinery of spectral parading kings, resurrected corpses, and witches.  An example of the play's realism is the scene preceding the murder of Lady Macduff and her four children -- Lady Macduff doesn't bear her husband's flight from their castle with equanimity; she sees herself as abandoned to the violence of her husband's enemies and bitterly decries the situation.  Her complaints on this subject make the scene in which she and her children are murdered all the more horrific -- Shakespeare makes her as real and plausible as possible before she is butchered.  (The show has a very effective bit of business -- Ross brings Macduff souvenirs of his dead children, a toy sword and a doll.  Macduff puts these artifacts in his shirt, next to his heart when he embarks on his mission to destroy Macbeth.  The toy sword is symbolically significant -- every one plays murder with their boy-children, rough-housing with them to simulate the battlefield.  In this world, one learns murder as a mere toddler.)  Ultimately, the show's darkness is unremitting.  The production's commitment to the blackest kind of nihilism is shown in the final scene.  After Macbeth's corpse has been beheaded, his head in a bloody sack is carried up onto cage-like ramparts and stuck on the pike --the head must be simulated by a cabbage or melon or something because, at first the gory thing doesn't give, resisting the pointed pike until with a grotesque, liquid sound, the shell breaks and the spike sinks in deep.  The three witches, then, raise their arms in a sort of fascist salute -- it looks like an image from Fuseli.  The witches salute an abyss of nothingness, a corpse's head:  to be king is to be tyrant is to be nothing at all:  it's a world in which "our monuments shall be the maws of kites."

The new fashion in staging Shakespeare, at least at Winona, is to extend the sword-to-sword combat as if Shakespeare required, like Star Wars, protracted duels with light sabers.  In each play, the stage combat was lengthy and intricately choreographed.  This is almost always a bad idea.  Even the best designed stage combat always looks like professional wrestling -- every move is elaborately worked-out (otherwise someone would get hurt).  It never looks real and, always, distracts the audience from the more important business in the plays.  There's another convention that I think is equally ludicrous, although I'm not sure how it can be  avoided.  In many scenes, the characters engage in deliberations and, then, turn sharply on their heel and, then, march resolutely off the stage.  This resolute, martial fast march looks improbable and, also, distracting.  It would be better, if possible, to just black out the scene before the characters spin on their heels and hustle off-stage.  The resolute manly march always seems, more than a bit foolish-- everyone shows identical fortitude in hustling off to fight and sometimes die.  Wouldn't, at least, someone show a bit of hesitation?