Tuesday, June 20, 2006

Hilary-ous

This is too funny - kariza takes exception to the lefty flavour of Macbeth.

I saw MacBeth last night with a friend at the Delacourte Theater in Central Park. I had looked forward to this. MacBeth is one of my favorite plays and is rarely performed. What we saw was a leftwing version of MacBeth complete with George Bush's voice booming out at us at the beginning of the battle scenes; anti-Catholic priest jokes which are not in the original play; three witches who are referred to as the "Three Weird Sisters" (as if they were a punk rock band) and a Lady MacBeth who behaves like Hillary Clinton. I simply did not care what happened to these characters. The notes in the program refer to Scotland - and the United States - as "a country divided by war". The war at the beginning of MacBeth is only incidental to the main action of the play. The play is really about MacBeth's ambition to be king and the ambition of his wife. The two of them have no doubt about what they want and what they will do to achieve it. There are also jokes about "equivocating politicans" which are not present in the original. MacBeth is played by Liev Schreiber who is a big leftwing actor. I am appalled at what has been done to this masterpiece. Shakespeare gloried in war - Henry V is an example. Moises Kaufman has destroyed a masterpiece. This is what happens when you allow the lefties to direct plays! If I want to see a "politicized" MacBeth, I will read MacBird, which savaged LBJ.

Heh. Laura Bush would make more sense with this reasoning, no?

If you Ctrl-F in this full text version of Macbeth you'll see there are, of course, mentions of the "three weird sisters" and equivocators. But then again, MIT might be in on the conspiracy.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

"Be bloody, bold, and resolute; laugh to scorn/ The power of man, for none of woman born/Shall harm Macbeth."
"Macbeth shall never vanquish'd be until/Great Birnam wood to high Dunsinane hill/Shall come against him."
These are two of my favorite examples of equivocation, which is a HUGE theme in Macbeth.
This review was absolutely hilarious!