Why You Can’t Say Macbeth in a Theater
Have you heard about the Scottish play? I have been waiting to narrate the curse of Macbeth.
Are you familiar with the show Little Britain?
There’s this character named Dennis Waterman, who I think is based on a real British person. But the joke is that he’s very small. And he’s always going to his agents' office, trying to get jobs but turning down every job because he insists on being able to write and sing the theme tune and also star in the show. He gets asked if he wants to be in Macbeth and he insists on writing the theme tune. So here’s the song that he comes up with;
He goes, “Mr. Macbeth is a naughty man doo doo doo doo doo, gone and killed another man. Doo, doo doo doo doo.
I have a good idea. Just thou keeps me near. I’ll be so good for the Scottish play.”
That’s the format of every theme tune he writes. And that’s it but I think it was a really lovely description.
What’s the rundown? Who was the other man that he kills? And what are the things that have happened?
Macbeth is all about ambition and it’s also about destiny. Macbeth essentially wins a huge battle at the beginning of the play. And then he encounters three weird witches. They greet him and say that he has all these new titles. They say he’s one day gonna be king. And he finds it interesting and kind of just holds on to it. He basically tells his wife this prophecy and she gets bloodthirsty with this idea. She loves it. So, she comes up with the idea to kill the King when he comes to their house in the evening. Macbeth isn't totally supportive of the plan but his wife convinces him eventually. They decide to go on with it. And he murders the king and becomes the king.
There are more scenes where the witches prophesize his downfall, but he thinks he’s invincible. And the only way that he can be killed is by a man who is not born of a woman and a man who was born of a cesarean section.
This is a canonical play. It’s a huge deal. A lot of people have maybe acted in excerpts of this. I was cast in Macbeth play years back in a different life, I didn’t get to play Lady Macbeth. It wasn’t a big deal but it wasn’t until I was able to be in that production that I personally learned of the subject of this article, which is, that the Scottish Play reputably is cursed.
We’re gonna get these amazing examples of this curse, kind of coming to fruition. Whether or not you believe in curses or not, it’s hard to deny that there are some spooky coincidences.
So, what is the history of the curse? Why is Macbeth cursed? The play itself?
For those of you who may not be Thespians, you may not even be aware that there is this superstition and this taboo of saying that word inside of a theater. But if you are around anybody with a BFA, they will instantly jump down your throat if you say that because it’s purportedly to bring very bad luck, even if you’re not performing that play. If you’re just inside the theater and you say, ‘Macbeth’, it’s horrible luck and then there’s a bunch of crazy rituals to kind of cleanse yourself if you do.
In the theatre company that I was a part of, you had to go outside spin in a circle, spit and yell a curse word. Then, knock and ask permission to be let back in the theater. crazy right?
It apparently goes back to the very first production. And it’s carried throughout the centuries, productions of the play have been plagued with bad luck, deaths, sicknesses, and just all sorts of crazy things. It begs the question, is there an actual curse? Or are actors just clumsy and uncoordinated? It’s up for debate. In the first production of the play, Shakespeare was rumored to have used real, not only incantations from witches and also ingredients commonly used in their cauldrons.
What was believed was that, because he used these real incantations and real ingredients, the witches of the time were pissed off at his cultural appropriation, and placed a curse on the production. That’s the story. And then, the very first, performance was cursed. The young male actor who was playing Lady Macbeth came down with a fever and died just before the opening. And apparently, Shakespeare himself was rumored to have gone on in his stead. It was common for men to play women’s roles at that time.
There’s something else that will inform the context here, which is the reign of King James I. King James was a massive theater guy who loved patronizing the theater and being a patron thereof. So he was probably Shakespeare’s most important audience member.
Apparently, he did not like the show. It could have been the whole murdering the king part.
This is not like the modern days, where Joe Biden could dislike your work. Then, go on stage and publicly berate your work. That would be great for business actually. Back then, if the king didn’t like your play, he could arrest you. He could just have you killed.
Because of that, the show was not performed again for many years. And it’s hard to exactly pinpoint when the next performance was. But there are some sites that say that the next time it was performed was actually not in England, but in Amsterdam in 1672.
That production also had some mishaps. The actor who was playing Macbeth was having an affair with the wife of the actor playing Duncan and then chose to actually bring a real dagger on stage and murder Duncan during the performance.
That was the next horrible tragedy in the production of the Scottish play. You would think at some point, the theatre companies would stop producing the play since people kept dying, but they kept going.
The next time that it was performed was possibly in London by a company called the Duke’s company.
They were a company licensed by Charles II to perform Macbeth at the time. It came to the big duel between Macbeth and Macduff. And there was an accident where the actor named Henry Harris accidentally ran his sword through the eye of the actor playing Macbeth killing him. Can you imagine being in the audience?
There was another one in 1703 where a category two hurricane struck England and caused a ton of damage and killed 1500 seamen, right as the play was opening. So that was one from the gods. Wow
I’d say Sir Laurence Olivier may be the most famous Shakespearean actor of all time and did a performance art production at the Old Vic in 1937. He was preparing to play Macbeth for the first time. The director and the woman who was playing lady Macduff were in a car accident on the way to the theater. Two days later, the dog belonging to the old Vic’s founder was run over by a car. Then, Olivia was apparently so distraught by all of this that he lost his voice and couldn’t speak which had caused the opening to be postponed. Three days after the opening of the show, the director was replaced. A 25-pound stage weight apparently crashed down from the flies barely missing Sir Laurence Olivier’s head by inches.
Also, the woman who was playing Lady Macbeth died of a heart attack just before dress rehearsal. The next time the Old Vic produced that show, the portrait of the actress whose last name was Bayless that was hung in the theater, fell from the wall on opening night.
I also have to get to the present day. I mean, there are some really good ones leading up to a massive pop-culture phenomenon that happened recently.
But just to fly through some of the more recent ones. Charlton Heston's tights got soaked in kerosene and his tights caught on fire during the performance. He had burns all over his groin and legs.
And then we also had Alec Baldwin in production in 1998 where he sliced open the hand of the actor playing Macduff and shot him in the face.
But what was really interesting was the Academy Awards?
Chris Rock was on stage and he said, “ Macbeth, loved it”. And then right after he said that in a theatre, Will Smith slapped Chris Rock in the face.
I’ll just add in that in the production we had, we did have a couple of people who dropped out, we had one person who could no longer be in the production because they got arrested, unrelated, I think, to the play.
I have massive respect for anybody involved with the staging of the production of Shakespeare because those things are intense.
I do have to point out the methodology here. There have been many productions of the Scottish play over the centuries, and you’re not near as likely to hear about the ones where things went off without a hitch but it’s happened often enough that people really do believe this superstition.
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