Brief Candle, Walking Shadow

This blog post is about a single performance of a play that I attended. Yet this is not a play review. It is a description of an experience. Which, under the circumstances (as you will see) is perhaps more apt.

We shall go back to one of my last nights in London, in the middle of November. The amber of the fallen autumn leaves mingles, all too suddenly, with the blackness of early nightfall. What better thing to do, at the outset of one of these long, long nights, than attend a play? Especially when that play is set in the small, intimate quarters of the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, the Globe Theatre’s winter season venue. And especially when the play is that darkest of tragedies (both literally and figuratively), Macbeth.

And what better way to stage Macbeth than by candlelight?

The Sam Wanamaker Playhouse is built to the type of indoor theatres contemporary to the original Globe, including the Blackfriars one itself, the winter venue of Shakespeare and company. It is not only built to the architectural design of these theatres, but also draws inspiration from the written accounts of lighting effects they used. When all the audience members reach their seats and the performance is about to begin, the floor floodlights go out; the small dark theatre is lit solely by candles. Darkness and candles are used to great dramatic effect, just as described of those theatres of old.

I knew all this going into the play. I’ve always wanted to go to one of these winter season plays at the Sam Wanamaker. When I found out that I would have a chance to see not just any play there, but my favorite Shakespeare play, and one so incredibly suited to the darkness and the candlelight, I couldn’t resist. I added extra days in London for the express purpose of attending.

But even though I knew this much going into it, I really had no idea how mesmerizing of an experience I was getting myself into.

I should like to point out, before I end this preamble-y business and dive into the description of the thing, that the most important part of a Shakespeare play is the words. That is, after all, what makes Shakespeare Shakespeare, right? Let me also say — and I hope, not being an actor myself, I don’t presume too much by saying this — that Shakespeare is the actor’s playwright. He was, after all, an actor himself. And while I don’t have citations (this being, after all, only a travel blog), I’ve read and heard so many times that Shakespeare’s roles give the greatest, most exciting, most difficult, most rewarding challenge of any other roles on (or off) the stage. Thus, as I endeavour to recount some of the haunting atmosphere of this production, please keep in your mind that the lifeblood of the production were ever and always the words of the Bard and the superb performances of the actors.

Now, back to the stage. The stage is immediately in front of us, a long arm’s reach away from our left elbow. In fact, the only thing between us and the stage are a few steps of stairs, stairs leading up to the close ring of seats at which we sit and up to the stage itself. One of the volunteer ushers informs those of us right next to these stairs that a bit of action in the play shall be happening on them, asking us to please keep ourselves out of the way.

Excited by the usher’s words and the prospect of the action right at our elbow, we sit in practically giddy anticipation. Then the lights go out. The only remaining faint glimmer comes from the flicker of a few wicks on the chandeliers that lay a bit haphazardly on the stage. The play begins.

Whispered incantations hiss. Black figures slink in the darkness. One realizes immediately that in this setting it is possible for the action, for the lines, to be eerily, unusually quiet.

And yet so clear. One would not expect such clarity to come from darkness. But that comes from skill. It comes from a reverence, a focus on the play’s words.

In so many scenes, set in darkness, the minimum of lighting is used. At times the actors hold up, as though they were the torches of the scene, candles with little shields towards the audience. Their faces are illuminated sparingly (but well-planned, expertly) by these small flames. Another time, the chandeliers are raised to the sky-painted ceiling, their candles extinguished, just in time for Banquo’s lines...There’s husbandry in heaven…The frugal sky extinguishes the stars...Everywhere, darkness looms.

In scenes of impending doom, candles are slowly blown out. In almost total darkness, the witches actually appear suddenly and vanish suddenly. In between scenes, candles are slowly and solemnly lit or slowly and solemnly extinguished — sometimes by shadowy anonymous figures, sometimes by the characters themselves.

Yet when we reach those lines of Macbeth’s fateful speech...Out, out, brief candle! / Life’s but a walking shadow...The staging is completely simple. The lighting is completely utilitarian. No effects, no witchcraft. Simply the words, creating the effect in our minds. Simply our imaginations, transfixed. These words are surrounded by scenes before and after in which candles are lit so briefly, then extinguished, in which shadowy figures walk about...Out, out, brief candle! / Life’s but a walking shadow...But the setting for these eponymous words themselves is left straightforward.

The effect is breathtaking. It could, after all, be a bit cheesy to use candles to dramatic effect during Macbeth. But that thought is not allowed to even linger outside the door, let alone enter the audience’s minds. Sublime artistry reigns supreme.

And the sounds. The music of the production is in those whispered incantations from the start, in visceral singing vocals, in cries, in the raw human instrument. Our eyes see mostly blackness. But the fog on the heath, the rough highlands, reach our imagination through our ears.

On those stairs to our left, the action does indeed step just beside us, up and down. Even the ghost of Banquo brushes right past our arm. We shudder.

In one particularly poignant scene, a single flame is very suddenly and abruptly blown out.

We end in total darkness.

They’re my favorite lines of all time, Tomorrow...and tomorrow...and tomorrow...That utmost utterance of loss, expressed by a murderer at the death of his murderess wife, reaching the very depths of the darkness in ourselves. There’s husbandry in our souls during that speech. How frugal is the chariot that bears the human soul…(Emily Dickinson).

It’s sometimes a bit problematic to know a play so much by heart. One can be distracted by the anticipation of the words in one’s own head. But this production, that in its very staging anticipated and afterwards echoed the brief candle and walking shadow, held this Macbeth fan completely transfixed — even mystified.

I’ll leave you with those words:

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, To the last syllable of recorded time; And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player, That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more. It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing