AHDS Collections

Designing Shakespeare Collection - Audio Interview Clip

- Macbeth

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Designing Shakespeare Collection - Macbeth
Filename	:	DS_JN_au09.mov
Description	:	Answer: A kind of derelict church, I mean a sort of protestant church. It's a very simple galleried area and it then had a very, sort of catholic pieces in it, chandeliers, a huge candelabra, an altar [traffic noises]Õ? they got more and more elaborate and basically there was this whole thing like desecrated, a performance in a desecrated church, and the witches were these mad things and they swung on the chandeliers and, and, I mean it was baroque and labyrinth-like in its imagery and we got completely panned, completely and utterly taken to the cleaners by the critics, and I thought it was, you know, it was fun and it was fantastically alive. I remember we had like, there were like plaster models of the virgin and in the, in theÕ? Lady Macduff scene, they smashedÕ? you know, there was mayhem. Then we did it a second time at the Aldwich, and we pared it down a little bit, we pulled back on some of the some more excessive sort of theatricals, and, you know, it was received slightly better, but, you know, it had it's day, you know. That was about 1974. Seventy-fourÕ?yeahÕ?or Seventy-five. And when we started to do the Wooden O with Chris, we were also going to do productions in the Other Place, and the production that Trevor chose to do in the Other Place was The Scottish Play, [laughing] and I thought he couldn't do it, he was bonkers to want to do it again. But he had Ian McKellen and Judi and we started off basically where we had left off, and we had black velour drapes and candelabras and there was a lot of the sort of proppy stuff from the other production that was introduced into that production. I mean I was just beat up on Macbeth, I mean I couldn't go any further, I mean I'd done it and by that time I'd done it about eight times I think, and so we got through this final run through and like I described earlier, I just said let's get rid of it all, let's just put this wooden backboard up so they've got somewhere to enter from, put these boxes and we got a light fixture in the middle that they could swing around onÕ?that's what we did and that became a kind of, a standard set for the production of The Scottish Play that, you know, was considered to be as much as those things can ever be, definitive, but for that generation the definitive Shakespeare, Macbeth. While we were working on that production, I happened to have in my books, a copy of Shakespeare's Macbeth, a Penguin version which I had scribbled in on the way to Stratford to see Trevor some three years earlier, four years earlierÕ? thumbing through it, there on the back page was a drawing of wooden slats with a gap in the middle and a circle mark on the floor. That was it. That's what I was going to propose to Trevor on the very first day we met to work with each other. It took us three-and-a-half year, four years to get to that point, but it was a great learning curve. I mean, you know, it was probably, had we have done that set initially it wouldn't have worked. I mean, that's the irony. I mean you could say Õ?clever clogs' or Õ?I got it right', you know, but the reality is that everyone has got to be in tune at exactly the right moment for those things to actually come off. I mean it's not just a question of imposing one thing on the will of another. So I find that completely fascinating.
Source	:	DS_16_05_02 (2xmini DV tape)
Format	:	Quicktime Progressive (audio)
Type	:	Resource Audio
Rights	:	This clip may be used for educational purposes only, any commercial use of this material requires permission from the copyright holders. Misuse or misrepresentation may result in legal action. Copyright holder: Christie Carson, COMPH, Royal Holloway University of London.
Length	:	5 minutes 09.00 seconds