When Lady Macbeth is waiting for Macbeth to come back after he has murdered Duncan she is alone. I want the actress playing her to show this by looking frightened. I want her facial expressions to always be scared. She needs to react to the slightest sounds to show she is scared i.e. When she says “Hark” and “I am afraid” because the audience will feel it as well. The audience is normally only scared because they can feel what the character is feeling. I would have her pacing around the stag to show she is restless. This picture of Lady Macbeth reveals that she really is human and not some evil spirit. It contrasts with her dominant figure from earlier on in the plat when Macbeth is around; she is only dominant to make sure Macbeth is confident.
When Macbeth comes back from the murder I wasn’t her whole body language to change from her being scared and restless to the dominant and confident figure. When with Macbeth she needs to look like the strong one of the two. Macbeth wasn’t sure this was the right thing to do so she needs to stay confident to keep him convinced it is the right thing to do.
Before Macbeth arrives I would want the actress playing Lady Macbeth to be both quiet and loud this way it will show how nervous she is. When it is quiet I want her to be quiet so background noises like the owl will stand out. When she hears something that frightens her I want her voice to become loud to show she was frightened i.e. “Hark”. I want her to speak slowly when she is on her own.
When Macbeth Arrives Lady Macbeth uses many monosyllabic words, to show she is nervous and tense e.g. “Did not you speak?” However, then I want the actress to act totally different around Macbeth. She needs to be the dictator in the relationship. It is important that she does this because Macbeth was never sire that they should carry out the “Dirty Deed” and she needs to keep him convinced that he has done the right think. Lady Macbeth snaps into her dominant role again when she says, “Consider it not so deeply”. When Lady Macbeth turns into the dominant figure she needs to sound strong and controlling and means every word she says. However, some people may interpret her to be evil and doing it because she wants the power.
At the beginning of the scene Lady Macbeth is speaking in prose not blank poetic verse. This tells me she is scared and she is not hiding under anything anymore, she is just being herself.
In this point in the film I want the lighting to be very low and I want to have close ups on their faces at the appropriate moments. Like when the owl shocks Lady Macbeth.
It is very important that she uses words blood and hell etc. Because this is what the play is about and how she is trying to forget about these and the horrible results at the end. Macbeth connect blood with guilt “Smear their faces… so it seems their guilt” this line is very ironic because she is the one that ends up going mad and killing herself. The fact that Lady Macbeth tries to wash away the blood shows her trying to suppress her guilt. Lady macbeth uses euphemisms, she uses words like “deeds” and never refers to the word murder directly, showing she can’t even face up to what she’s involved with. This foreshadows her later breakdown. Macbeth shows the fear they had of hell and violating the natural order. In Elizabethan times they believed God was the most powerful and then the King. If this natural order was broken they feared they would go to hell, this is why Macbeth never wanted to murder the King. When Lady Macbeth says, “These deeds must not be thought of” I would want her to hold Macbeth’s face in her palms and force him to look into her eyes to get him to focus on her words instead of the blood. This shows she really believes what she is doing is the right think and shows this to Macbeth.
When they hear knocking on the door it changes the whole feel of the scene and creates tension. At this point I will make it silent so the door knocking stands out above the other noises. When Lady Macbeth hears the knocking I want her to get even more fidgety and nervous than she already is. But I also want her to look like she is trying to act normally so she doesn’t spook Macbeth. I want the audience to think “Is she really as strong as she looks?”
In Act 5, Scene 1 – the sleepwalking scene its nighttime and Lady Macbeth is sleepwalking, clutching her candle close to her. In this scene I want the effect still to be eerie because Lady Macbeth’s behaviour is eerie. Most of the time I want it to be a wide shot so the doctor, lady and Lady Macbeth can all be in the shot. When the doctor and gentlewoman are observing Lady Macbeth they need to be standing at a distance but not too far away because they need to still be in the shot. Five to ten metres should be adequate. When Lady Macbeth is speaking I want a close up so you can see her facial expressions and the candle reflecting off her face will add to the effect.
The lighting will be kept to a minimum, only Lady Macbeth’s candle and maybe another one or two candles. If there is too much light in the scene the audience’s attention won’t be on Lady Macbeth, with minimal light and most light on Lady Macbeth most attention will be on her.
Lady Macbeth’s candle needs to stay close to her because he uses it to ward off evil spirits and by keeping it close it will show she is scared. Lady Macbeth also fears the darkness because earlier on in the play she says “Come thick night” where she invited darkness in to stop “Heaven” from seeing what she was doing. She now fears the darkness and wants light near her. Shadows would play a good effect in the scene because these would torment her when she sees them.
Before Lady Macbeth starts speaking I would want her to be rubbing her hands and scratching them vigorously as if she was trying to remove the blood from her hands even thought there is none there. I would use props such as a sink to clean her hands in and the candle, I don’t want the scene to be too complicated so attention is drawn away from Lady Macbeth.
When Lady Macbeth is trying to clean her hands because she is seeing blood that isn’t there she says, “Out damned spot, out I say!” She needs to say it like she is angry because she is trying all she can to get it off but it won’t go. She also needs to be nervous because she is afraid that if she doesn’t remove the spot someone else may see and she will be found out that she was involved with the murder. I want the audience to be surprised at how she is acting and hallucinating and how the murder has turned her crazy. When she is cleaning her hands I want a close up on them to show that there is actually no blood and she is just imagining it again.
A modern audience wouldn’t be too surprised at seeing a women sleepwalking because they can explain it. However, an Elizabethan audience would be very shocked. Not much was known about mental problems and it was connected with witchcraft. Lady Macbeth also says “Hell is murky” and Elizabethan audience would almost collapse when hearing these words because they had a great fear of hell because religion was a massive part of their lives. When Lady Macbeth says, “Hell is murky” she is suggesting that she has been to hell and back. The doctor’s reaction to seeing her sleepwalking reveals the fear at the time that she was possessed by demons.
When she is sleepwalking she is re-enacting the past in her head. An Elizabethan audience would have found this very strange and almost frightening, however, a modern audience wouldn’t fell the same. A modern audience is used to this type of behaviour, we understand mental behaviour, whereas the Elizabethans would have attributed her behaviour to the devil. When the actress is playing this part I want her to move suddenly and make it look like she is aware of her surroundings. She needs to seem as if the devils are all around her and are closing in and she is trying to ward them off.
In Act 5, Scene 1 Lady Macbeth’s words tell a lot about how she is feeling and her state of mind. The sentences are disjointed and she jumps from one idea to the next this shows how her mind is buzzing. She speaks in prose, which she only speaks in on a few occasions throughout the play. When she speaks in prose it shows that she is being herself and is not trying to cover anything up. Her words and actions are very ironic compared to how she was in earlier scenes. She says, “Consider it not so deeply”, “It will make us mad” and “a little water clears us of the deed”. All these quotes are ironic because she is the one who can’t get the thoughts out of her mind, she is the one who is going mad and she is the one who can’t get the thought of blood out of her head. I want Lady Macbeth to say words such as “blood” with a chilling sound to it. The actress will need to show her guilt I would want her to do this by repeating and going through what happened on the night of the murder again and again as if she was trying to justify her actions.
To convince Lady Macbeth actually has gone insane I will make her hurt herself with the candle and try to burn the spots of blood off of her. This will definitely shock the audience. This will change the views that the audience have about Lady Macbeth. They will finally believe she has gone insane and she isn’t’ as strong as she tried to be in the earlier scenes. At the end of the scene I would like the audience to be left thinking if she had taken the murder how Macbeth did she wouldn’t have gone mental.
At the end of the play I want the audience to pity Lady Macbeth, having witnessed her gradual descent into insanity and seeing her broken spirit. It is traditional in tragedies to see the downfall and death of a good person. The theme of assassinating the king was a hot topic at the time. Considering the play was written for James I Shakespeare had to keep him happy by making sure justice was done. Lady Macbeth deserved what she got for betraying the natural order. The audience at the time would have been outraged if those responsible for killing the King had got away with it. In the end order was restored and those responsible were dead.
