VIII.
The Scottish play was quite the adventure, believe me. I’m not a superstitious woman by any means, but I believe in its power over others. If Coriolanus needs blue Smarties in his breast pocket for each show, I’ll pick the blue ones out myself. If Richard III feels that he’ll perform badly unless he rubs Vaseline on his thighs, then I will make sure that Vaseline is in good supply.
I also don’t believe in luck, but I must admit that MacBeth was the unluckiest show I’ve ever been a part of. Two weeks into rehearsal, we lost our first of many Banquos. A bad car accident broke both of the poor man’s legs, and they weren’t expected to mend anywhere near in time. The first batch of scripts were riddled with typos. The second Banquo contracted Lyme Disease. Several of the props fell apart—swords were known to topple off hilts in the midst of battle, and the witches’ cauldron spewed smoke like a brush fire. And our third Banquo, a very nervous man by nature, couldn’t stand the pressure of everyone watching him to see what new disease might take him down. He quit of his own accord.
Edward Zwick was forced to step in, ending a retirement of five years, to prove that there was no curse. He made a fine, healthy Banquo throughout the run.
I enjoyed playing Lady MacBeth, but it’s a rather limiting character. She is almost always played as a tyrannical bitch. I decided to play her as more subtly controlling. I didn’t want to steal the show from our MacBeth, who was a wonderful actor who can still be found with the WSP. If his wife is played as a screaming fiend, then MacBeth looks weaker for it. I made a Lady MacBeth that showed fear at times. Although she could sound heartless, you could never be sure just how driven she really was. When she makes one of her most famous speeches, I planted just the seed of doubt in the minds of the audience about how resolved that Lady actually was:
I have given suck, and know
How tender’tis to love the babe that milks me:
I would, while it was smiling in my face,
Have pluck’d my nipple from its boneless gums
And dash’d the brains out, had I so sworn to you
Have done to this.
I played a considerably weaker Lady MacBeth, and though I knew I would take criticism for it, I also knew that high screaming mania would not be a surprise. With any of the most performed plays—MacBeth and Hamlet—both the audience and the actors want something different. This is what I hoped to give them.
This was around the same time that the rumours of my rampant lesbianism began. I have no proof and can’t say for certain, but I suspect that the rumours were started by Henry Vaughn, who was still mending a bruised ego and a lacerated tongue. I didn’t particularly care that anyone thought I was a lesbian, and I couldn’t be bothered to prove my sexuality either. But I didn’t like how what Celeste had said so long ago had proved true: if a woman is successful it’s presumed to be the result of unusual sexual appetites. I didn’t like that people thought lesbianism would give me some kind of added leverage in the roles that I achieved, and I liked even less that being considered gay made me less respected as a person. Like always, I could only pretend I was deaf and become a better actress to distract myself.
The play went well, not tremendously. There was nothing really wrong with it, it just paled in the reception that was given to Much Ado. The reviews were generally positive, but some critics mistook my underplaying the role for a boredom. The important thing was that the curse of MacBeth didn’t seem to effect any of our performance. No one was sick or injured, no cues were missed, no lines forgotten, and no more Banquos lost. Although he claimed not to be a superstitious man, I did notice that Edward whistled
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