Dark arts: Macbeth opens at the COC
Full of sound and fury, indeed
Having declared in the last newsletter that Verdi’s Macbeth leaves the opera director no other option but a staging set in its original time and place, I found myself last night at the opening of David McVicar’s Chicago-Toronto co-production which confidently jumps the original setting to create a Victorian Gothic Macbeth. I stand corrected. The apparitions, the witches’ cauldron, the multiple ghost sightings, the bloodied babies, the corpses, the thunderstorms: they all make sense from inside this genre that is by now quite familiar to us. There are genuinely scary moments in the production, the dread factor building up act to act. McVicar also added three (demonic?) children in nightgowns who creep around some of the key scenes. When the witches prophecy that Macbeth will be king, the children raise their hands to point at him; when after the final scene of carnage, a new child-king is crowned, they surround him and point. In another scene, they are the phantom children that the Macbeth couple never had; on other occasions these witches’ little pages are handling dead babies, one covered in blood with the umbilical cord hanging (no, stay with me, it works) and another in a tiny baby coffin.
Primogeniture and bloodlines—and interrupting their slow work to speed up one’s assumption to throne with the treacherous help of witchcraft, ahem—is at the crux of the opera, so no wonder ghostly babies, children and adolescents abound. There is a surprisingly obstetrically specific prophecy by the witches in Act 3 on which a major act of revenge hinges in the final act. McVicar was probably well attuned to all of this, and the considerable presence of children in the Victorian Gothic genre was there for the taking.