Director Saro Lusty-Cavallari Discusses MACBETH

Montague Basement's upcoming production of Shakespeare's Macbeth offers an affecting and horrifying vision of darkness and illusion, says director and designer Saro Lusty-Cavallari.

"It's probably important to get this out of the way; Macbeth is not a political play and if it is, it's an appealingly crude one," Lusty-Cavallari notes. "Regicide is bad, blood begats blood; there's not much sophisticated analysis you can bring to issues of state, governance etc. that are offered by the English and Roman histories."

"However Macbeth is an absolutely devastating cross section of the imagination. The psychological burden Macbeth bears is something everyone can relate to, where or not they've committed regicide recently."

According to Lusty-Cavallari, it's easy to find connection points as a modern audience.
"I can completely sympathise with the obsession to find the inarticulatable real, the "bank and shoal of time" that always feels overturned by our regrets and desires."
"It's impossible not to hear a line like "function is smothered in surmise and nothing is but what is not" and not be fundamentally challenged philosophically."

For Lusty-Cavallari, the way into this challenge is through the mechanism of performance itself.

"For this production I really wanted to completely embrace the illusion of the theatre, just as the simple phrase "hail King, hereafter" inspires a bloody chain of events the most simple gesture on a bare stage can conjure up just as much."

"I think the eureka moment for this play for me came when I realised that Macbeth is a play so associated with darkness. It's referenced all throughout, explicitly set at night and in dimly lit castles - and yet it was written for an outdoor daylight theatre."

"No wonder it starts with the witches' chant: the whole play is gigantic illusion. I definitely wanted to restore that uneasy contradiction between what you're told and what you're witnessing. After all, "fair is foul and foul is fair"."

Photo by Hannah Cox

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