Our president, Frances
Dharmalingham, has written a critique of a recent visit to the opera: Verdi’s ‘Macbeth’.
At Christmas 2018, my family’s gift to me was the promise of
a visit to the opera. Finally, in October 2019, that promise was fulfilled, and
we all spent a wonderful evening at His Majesty’s Theatre, completely
enthralled by the W.A. Opera’s production of Verdi’s Macbeth. What a magnificent experience!
Being uneducated about music, I cannot comment on the
technicalities of the orchestra’s performance or the singing. But I can say that from the first note of the
overture I (and I am sure the entire audience) was wrapped and suspended in the
most wonderful sound, as it anticipated and established the atmosphere of each
scene, supporting and intensifying the prevailing or developing moods; and as
the singing and acting revealed both character and emotion.
Along with the sound was the visual impact. Sets were
effectively created through easily-moved columns and minimal furnishings, while
the brilliant lighting scheme was crucial to the overall combined visual and
emotional experience. As the scenery and costumes used mainly blacks, greys and
white, with sudden bursts of scarlet, so too the lighting made clever use of
contrasting dark shadows and bright, white light, with the implied menace of
red in appropriate scenes.
There were so many memorable moments: among them the dagger
scene, Banquo’s murder, Macbeth’s return visit to the witches, the sleepwalking
scene, the appearance of the English army, and the final duel.
The discovery of Duncan’s dead body had rather a different
emphasis from the scene in the play. Shakespeare’s play describes the horror of
the unseen bodies of the king and guards, and then focuses on Malcolm’s
and Donalbain’s need to escape; the opera featured a great outcry of alarmed
dismay and anger, with the entire chorus on stage and a harsh white light full
on the revealed body of Duncan. This was followed by a very moving hymn,
the whole episode extraordinarily powerful.
In contrast to this, we were not shown the cruel slaughter
of Lady Macduff and her children, but learnt of it through Macduff’s movingly
beautiful lament.
Another major point of difference was the portrayal of the
witches, with all the women of the chorus singing for them in three groups,
instead of three single performers. Similarly, the three murderers were presented
by the whole male chorus.
Banquo’s murder was undertaken in suitably dark
surroundings, as in a forest, and his ghost’s appearances at the feast were
cleverly engineered. The supernatural elements were most effectively handled
when Macbeth returned to the witches, with the future kings one after another
clearly not Macbeth’s descendants. For this scene a section of the stage floor
was removed and the lurid light from below suggested that the witches’ cauldron
was being heated by the fires of hell.
An interesting scene showed a crowd of poor and injured
refugees, and established the effects of the war. It gave us a visual summary
of the details given in the play, in the discussion between Macduff and
Malcolm. It was followed by the really dramatic sudden arrival of the English
army to support Malcolm’s campaign. It is notoriously difficult to show an
“army” on stage, but this was a strikingly symbolic image, with an arrowhead
formation of armour-clad soldiers bearing banners of the cross of St. George: a
spectacularly effective moment.
As we are frequently reminded, Shakespeare’s play is noted
for its poetic language and the power and variety of its imagery. This was
necessarily the one element which was sacrificed in transforming Macbeth from drama to opera. I do not
speak Italian and cannot therefore comment on the libretto as sung, but I took
occasional glances at the sur-titles – only occasional, because the story is so
familiar and the performance was so engrossing that I didn’t want or need to
look away from the stage more than I could help. What phrases I did see carried
fleeting echoes of well-known lines, but mostly they were prosaic rather than
poetic, reminding one of the process of translation from 17th
century English to 19th century Italian and back to 21st
century English. This is only a comment, not a criticism.
To watch this performance was to be given a new perspective
on the play, seeing the story unfold, the characters develop, interact and
respond to events, and to feel the full emotional impact of Macbeth’s downfall.
It will serve as an enriching backdrop to my next re-reading of the play
itself.
