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“There is hardly another young stage-director who can drive actors to such extreme emotions as the Catalonian Calixto Bieito. In Cardiff he showed this in a highly comical staging of Così fan tutte and was precisely why it reflected a present-day tragic life feeling. And similarly two years ago with Calderón’s La vida es sueño which had a sensational success in Edinburgh… With his staging of Valle-Inclán’s Barbaric Comedies Calixto Bieito has succeeded this summer, again in Edinburgh, in producing ‘power theatre’ of the utmost physicality.”
Süddeutsche Zeitung, 25 August 2000

Calixto Bieito is directing Macbeth. Photo: POSF/Drama office

Calixto Bieito

Calixto Bieito, born in Spain in 1963, is one of the most important stage-directors in his country and with his productions of plays and opera he has already become renowned at international festivals. He has been director of the Teatre Romea in Barcelona since 1999. Besides plays by Federico Garcia Lorca (La casa de Bernarda Alba – The House of Bernarda Alba), Calderon de la Barca (La vida es sueño), Bertolt Brecht (Galileo Galilei), and Thomas Bernhard (Wittgenstein’s Nephew), Calixto Bieito has often staged plays by Shakespeare, including The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Tempest, A Midsummer-Night’s Dream and Measure for Measure.
His performances of Ödön von Horváth’s Kasimir und Karoline (1994), Molière’s Amphitryon (1995); and King John by William Shakespeare received major critics’ awards in Spain. At present Calixto Bieito is directing Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera at the Gran Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona. The premiere of Don Giovanni at the English National Opera in London follows in May before he begins rehearsing Macbeth in Salzburg on the Perner Island.

The “Scottish Play” or TheWitchesCurse-MagicLanguageSorceryCauldron

The last of Shakespeare’s great tragedies tells the story of the rise and fall of the panic-stricken murderous dictator Macbeth. On the one hand the most constricting and oppressive play, the unpleasant intimate human study of power and paranoia, the power of imagination and mistrust. On the other hand it is Shakespeare’s most radical world sketch of an all-shattering ambiguity pronounced by the three witches right at the beginning: “Fair is foul, and foul is fair”. But what happens when absolutely nothing is certain any more? When no one knows each other any more! When they do not even know themselves? – There’s no need to panic, it gets even worse.

Witchcraft

The language of the play is characterised by the dissolution of exterior and interior logic, through the break-up of clarity, through language growing wild and becoming a labyrinth of floating references, ambiguities and double ambiguities. Rough-edged sentences stand there, dark and incomprehensible like the stones at Stonehenge, as threatening as floating icebergs, whose greatest mass swims invisibly underwater. In the same way that Macbeth’s body seems to dissolve when he himself comments from a cold distance as he watches his own transformation; how his feverish eyes observe the independent action of his hands; how physical identity melts away and the physical perception of his own being splits up nightmarishly into units of his body acting independently, the volatile language becomes a groping around in fog that is ever more dense, from which the screeching chatter of the witches is heard.

Images of illness

Images of “illness” describe the souls that are wasting away and the infected country, and doctors, blood-letting, aperients and medicines are prescribed as a cure for the soul of the country and the country of souls; echoes of verses from the Bible evoke metaphysical recollection, and there are endless metaphors from perverted nature which describe the collapse of the natural, God-willed, cosmic world order as the perversion of all norms, values and concepts: horses eat each other, wrens fight against owls, owls eat the eagle, and predators, hawks, swarms of flies, scorpions and snakes inhabit the language stage of the text, which – as a synaesthetic sensation – appears to have been plunged into the blackness of the night and the scarlet of blood, in which Macbeth wades and with which, to his own horror, he colours the great green ocean the red of bloody meat even when he only submerges his own hand.

Evil

In view of the dimension of crimes that destroy the deepest source and core of all human and cosmic raison d’être, “sensible”, analytical words are no longer suitable. Sensing their inappropriateness, one tries to find more important concepts, and words from mystical prehistory appear in the attempt to give a name to the unspeakable evil that goes beyond the bounds of every human horizon. The concept of “evil” here retrieves its archaic, metaphysical original sound, and a premonition of things of which our book-learning cannot dream oscillates in this sound – of the evil beyond social and psychological interpretation. The step over the fence of civilisation into the wilderness is only a small step. With his Macbeth Shakespeare cast a long glance over the fence; and at the same time of course he also wrote an Elizabethan horror-action-suspense shocker.