Dreams I’ll Send You | Essay 5
A birthday month practice
For the month of February 2025, I’ve decided to publish a micro essay once a day. I described the why and what over here.
I saw Macbeth at the movie theater this evening. The Donmar Warehouse in London mounted a production last year, with David Tennant as the title character and Cush Jumbo as Lady Macbeth. If I had only been in London last year, I would have tried to go. I love theater in London, I love Macbeth, and let’s not even get started on how I love David Tennant. But I haven’t been to London since just before the covid-19 lockdown — the longest period of time I’ve been away since I started traveling in earnest over two decades ago. I miss it. I miss traveling like I used to, before the pandemic, before the world started collapsing.
The relatively new format — or if not new, newly resurgent — of filming live theater performances for broadcast runs in movie theaters feels like an interesting (perhaps essential) way to fill the gap of immediate presence. As soon as I heard about this filmed version of Macbeth, I snapped up tickets. And I held my breath nearly all throughout the performance. The sets are minimal and the costumes are monochromatic. The sound design is intimate. David Tennant whispers, making you think you can almost feel him speaking directly into your ears, the most famous passages — the ones that have filtered their way down into our modern parlance. And the actors are modern but urgent, breaking the fourth wall often by staring directly at you through the camera. All you can see sometimes, magnified on Tennant’s and Jumbo’s faces filling up the screen, is anguish and a touch of guilty madness.
I’ve seen Macbeth staged so many times, on stage and on film, and in the immersive version of Sleep No More. Of course, having survived nearly half a millennium, its themes are universal and perennial. The core of corruption, the twisted sense of “manly action,” and the “vaulting ambition” that are at the center of the play are also on full display on our monitors and phone screens constantly these days.
What isn’t visible in our world is the underpinning of regret the play carries and that the film magnifies to movie screen heights. The play’s backlash of nature — the trees of Birnam Wood — is visited upon our vulnerable. And the hauntings from bad deeds and the moral clarity that shines through the end of the play seem lacking in our rooms of political power right now.
The film transfixed me. It held my attention for its entirety, for all of the reasons of its staging and its familiarity, but also because, given where we are now, it landed differently than in the past. I’m going to see it again.
Essay 6 is here.
