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RADIO
First Murderer
By HENRY TUBE IT was a rare privilege on Friday night to hear Paul Scofield give his first performance as Macbeth, in the Third Programme. Although his rumoured stage appearance in the role may add the force of physical presence, I don't be- lieve it could extend the range or depth of the intepretation. Mr Scofield as Lear seemed the nonpareil, but I'm not sure he's not assailable by Mr Scofield as Macbeth.
He gives us in effect Shakespeare's Dr Faustus —a Faustus who does not even stop to sign his name, but rides his own destiny full tilt over the abyss: I have no spur
To prick the sides of my intent, but only Vaulting ambition, which o'er-leaps itself And falls on the other—
For it is mere simplification to say that what Macbeth wanted was to be king, and the depth of Scofield's performance lies in showing us Macbeth as murderer, as fantasist—a man who would reverse Shakespeare's own sane self- analysis : 'In sleep a king, but waking no such matter.' Scofield's Macbeth forces dream to be- come reality, and, of course, reality retaliates by becoming nightmare. So the very construction of the play takes on the shape of a dream: cause and effect drastically telescoped (Duncan no sooner murdered than Macbeth is king): time and space melted and remoulded in the fire of imagery; the plot channelled through the gigantic central character, while the other charac- ters seem to swim in shadows at one remove. At his first encounter with the three weird sisters =that is (as ye would say) the goddesses of destinie,' Holinshed reminds us—Macbeth's voice is relaxed, almost lazy: 'the Thane of Cawdor lives,/A prosperous gentleman,' so that if his first line had not casually echoed their very words before he met them, we would swear this Faustus still owned his own soul. But with the confirmation of his new title, we are shown the underground stream for the first time; from that moment Shakespeare and Scofield together start to turn the world upside-down until, drawn on by the imagined dagger and grasping the real one,' Macbeth's dream and reality merge into one, as he: `With Tarquin's ravishing strides, towards his design/Moves like a ghost.' His hysteria, once the deed is done, is not so much remorse as the terror of half-wakiffg from a nightmare: • But wherefore could not I pronounce 'Amen'? I had most need of blessing. and 'Amen' Stuek in my throat.
His red hands are quite separate from him, he looks at them as objects over which he has no control.
But once he has the crown, Scofield makes us aware of a steadier Macbeth, a sleep-walker who is becoming experienced in his element, who call Permit himself a little stab of laughter as he invites Banquo to supper, ushering him out at. one door while he calls in his murderers at' another. His confidence, which began to blossom alarmingly as he bullied and cajoled the mur- derers, breaks all bounds at the banquet—'the
hearty welcome . . . here I'll sit i' th' midst. . . . Be large in mirth'—Scofield's voice grows louder and deeper, his laughter more frequent, until Banquo's ghost topples him into unreality once more. Even then he can recover quickly: `I drink to the general joy o' th' whole table,/ And to our dear friend Banquo, whom we miss;/Would he were here!' Scofield shows us his white face in the very sound of that last line.
By the last act Macbeth has come out on a new plateau, where nothing matters any more but the twin poles of his existence, the prophecies that Birnam Wood must come to Dunsinane before he can be defeated, and that he cannot be killed by any man born of woman. When the first actually happens, he clings the harder to the second, laughing all the time now as he fights with young Siward, but triumph mixed with relief as he looks at Siward's dead body and pronounces: 'Thou wast born of woman.' He is still laughing as he fights Macduff, until Mac- duff's 'Despair thy charm' rips away the last pillar of the dream, the spell is broken, and the dreamer wakes.
The effect of such a stunning realisation of Macbeth is to relegate his lady to a subordinate role, even though ir this production she is played by Peggy Ashcroft. One becomes aware that Lady Macbeth affects the movement of the play only at one point, and then only as the spur `to prick the sides of my intent' which Macbeth said he lacked. One cannot seriously believe that even if this Macbeth had been a bachelor. King Duncan would have survived his night at Inver- ness. Lady Macbeth is seen as an accessory to destiny, expendable once her husband is fairly launched. Nevertheless, whatever her part in the plot, Peggy Ashcroft leaves us in no doubt of her existence outside Macbeth's interior night- mare_ She is like the moon to his sun, her own career exactly mirrors his. We find no doubts in her whatever before the murder of Duncan, she seems to have been primed 'to catch the nearest way: as though she were a witch herself; and when Macbeth is hysterical after the murder, she is masterfully practical. 'Who was it that thus cried?' has all the superb scorn of Dame Peggy's Margaret of Anjou marshalling poor Henry VI to yet another battlefield. 'Retire we to our chamber./ A little water clears us of this deed': her own red hands, her own descent into night- mare come later, after Macbeth has ceased to share his secrets with her, when her particular brand of strength is no longer needed.
John Tydeman's production has many fine touches: the confused voices, with little whines and sighs a long way off, as the knocking on the gate disturbs the household; the horses (men- tioned later in the text by the Old Man) whinny- ing in terror behind the tolling bell after Duncan's murder; the rooks flying up after Banquo's murder on the dark road; and John Buckland's harsh, purgative music, brassy and percussive for battles and sudden death, almost electronic for the dagger and Banquo's ghost. The more pity that most of the minor roles are so drearily played, Duncan with one of those reach-me-
down-old men's voices, Banquo pale as a ghost long before he becomes one. Malcolm without a flicker of interest in what he's saying, but a blanket tone of unmitigated youthful enthusiasm. Even Alec McCovven's Macduff is disappointing, so busy picking his way over the words that he misses conveying the man underneath them. And the Weird Sisters over-dramatise them- selves; after all, l urks' noses and Tartars' lips are all in the day's work to them, hardly anything to slaver over at their age.
But taken all in all, and trying to forgive Mr Tydeman for making nothing of his two oppor- tunities for sunshine --'This castle hath a pleasant seat,' and the scene in England---I burn to hear this Macbeth again. It is to be repeated on May 22, again in the Third Programme. But why doesn't the BBC try it in the Home Service on a Wednesday afternoon and a Saturday night, and, come to that, a Monday night? A good murder story is a good murther story any day of the week.
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