Interview: Simon Godwin on How MACBETH Can Connect to Audiences Today

Simon Godwin is no stranger to the work of Shakespeare. 

In his career thus far, the director has worked with London’s National Theatre, the Royal Shakespeare Company, and the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington D.C., where he currently serves as the artistic director.

Until May 5, his production of Macbeth is playing in D.C. with a cast led by Ralph Fiennes and Indira Varma. But, despite using Shakespeare’s original language, this isn’t your grandfather’s Macbeth. Audiences everywhere will have the chance to see it for themselves when the film version of Godwin’s production hits theaters on May 2. 

BroadwayWorld sat down with Godwin to discuss his take on Shakespeare’s tragedy, Fiennes’ performance, and what the play means for contemporary audiences.

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Tell me about the decision to film the production.

Shakespeare's claustrophobic thriller Macbeth felt like it lent itself extremely well to a cinematic treatment. The camera is the closest you can ever get to an actor and a text. Telling it into a film felt very meaningful and appealing. Also, of course, we have the company that's led by Ralph [Fiennes] and Indira [Varma], who are so well known for their work on the screen. Many [members] of the company have done terrific work on camera before. This felt like a very natural next step. 

I'm curious about the challenges of having a stage production put on screen. It's staged for one medium and now is going to be transferred to another. What are some difficulties or preparations that you need to address once that's decided?

It's an ongoing project, isn't it? How to convey one art form within the realm of another? I had a great time with Jessie Buckley and Josh O'Connor doing Romeo and Juliet. That was meant to be a play but then became a film shot over 17 days. We aim to capture the stage production in a way that's effective and meaningful for audiences, but still rooted in the idea of the performance. We had some days where we were able to do set-ups and closeups, and it was shot over 3 nights. There was lots of coverage for the film, but its roots are in performance and in capturing the essence of that show.

Ralph Fiennes has done Shakespeare in the past, but this is somewhat a rare opportunity for people at home or in movie theaters to see him do this work. What do you think makes him the right person to play this role?

First of all, Ralph's relationship to the language is unparalleled. He loves the language and the language loves him. He has a deep lifelong commitment to bringing Shakespeare into the ears of a contemporary audience. I think Ralph has that rare gift of making these words sound like they're being said for the first time in the moment. He also, psychologically, has the spectrum of feelings that allow us access to the mind of both a killer and also the mind of a conscience man who is struggling to know what he should do. He passes through a schizophrenic breakdown and emerges at the other end of that a fully-fledged tyrannical monster. You chart over the evening the relinquishing of morality by Macbeth and Ralph is, all his brilliance, creating an arc for the character. I think you have a really rare insight into the disintegration of Macbeth in the hands of Ralph.

I was watching the film and thinking about how accessible his performance is. Somebody who may not be used to Shakespeare or may not understand every word can watch him and understand psychologically and emotionally what's happening with him throughout. I think this is a great introduction to someone that maybe isn't as familiar.

Absolutely. Ralph has talked about listening to Shakespeare and, as a boy, his mom playing him Lawrence Olivier or John Gielgud records. I think you sense that he wants to speak to the child in all of us, and wants to make the play accessible. I think it's so generous to take that attitude and I think that he and I feel very much that young people should enjoy the show as much as seasoned theatergoers. My aim is always clarity and accessibility, and I hope that the film leans into that.

When you approach a Shakespeare play that's been directed in various ways for hundreds of years, what's your first step? Do you think about an angle that you find compelling? Is it finding an adaptation that already exists? 

I think you're looking for that “Magic If” that Stanislavski talks about. That is, “If it was you, what would you do? What would you say? What would you feel?” So when I read these plays, I think “If I was in this situation, how would it be?” I try to find a personal resonance in the story. In this case, I think each of us has a feeling of entitlement, more or less. Or a sense that we've been deprived of an opportunity. 

Macbeth is about what that feeling can lead to when you follow it through to the bitter end. I understood that the play was about ambition. I've grappled with ambition myself, and when you start to personally engage, it helps all of the creative team.  Crucially, it also helps the actors to identify with these roles and not see them as historical roles written 400 years ago, but as living breathing things that their job is to animate now so that, ultimately, the audience sees themselves in the show.

You mentioned your collaborators. Could you share a little bit about the collaboration between yourself, the designers, and the creative team and bringing this into a more contemporary setting? 

I've worked with Emily Burns a lot on Shakespeare adaptations over the years. Emily wrote the screenplay for Romeo and Juliet and helped me with the adaptations of several Shakespeare’s including Antony & Cleopatra at the National Theater and Timon of Athens with Catherine Hunter at the RSE. She's a very trusted collaborator, and I think she has been brilliant at understanding how to pare the text back and lean into the thriller-ness of Macbeth. And then talking to Frankie Bradshaw who's designed the set and costumes.

It was a real journey to find the contemporary and not be coy about the fact that, if you do a play set in a war-torn landscape now, people will think of the wars that are going on around the world. It would be inaccurate for us to say that Macbeth is about any one of those but there are present poignant resonances of communities that are in conflict. And what does that conflict yield? In this case, it yields the rise of a tyrannical demagogue. It also gives rise to the Witches who, in our production, are victims of war. They seek to become agents of change in getting the ball rolling and making the prophecies. They are, in a way, the engine of the story. And, at the end when they're sitting on the steps, I think there's a feeling of suddenly asking themselves, ‘Was this all a good idea? Have lessons been learned? What are the consequences of our actions?’ It was very important to me that the Witches took that role as not bystanders, but protagonists in their own right. We were lucky to have our sound design. Christopher Shutt, who I've worked with a lot over the years, created this militaristic wartorn universe, and Asaf Zohar, our great composer, found the pulsating beat of the drama.

In terms of flow, we decided that it was going to be in a warehouse and would have a different kind of energy, which I think we captured a little bit in the film. Shakespeare's theater had no scene changes; scenes would move fluidly into one another. I think our standing set allows for that fluidity in this. One scene can tumble upon the other as we try and animate different parts of the set in any one scene.

You mentioned your version of the Witches. I was very interested in their costumes, which are not traditional. Can you talk about the decision to costume them the way that you did?

What was important for the team was that the Witches didn't feel othered. I think one road that some people have gone down over the years sees them as strange and alien beings who are somehow unfathomable and beyond the understanding of everybody. We wanted to go in the opposite direction of that here, with three women that we wanted to feel recognizable to the audience, who wanted to feel human, and like they had feelings and ideas and attitudes. The costuming is to render them contemporary. People will say to me ‘Oh, but they seem normal.’ It's not that they're normal, but they are familiar and are references from young women today who have emerged from different conflicts around the world.

With such a big production like this, what does your routine look like on the day-to-day? Do you stay involved?

Yes. The play's done over 120 performances now and 100,000 people have seen it. What's great about this company is that they are still hungry to evolve and change. And, of course, periodically being in these different venues has given a shot of energy to that whole process. I've been with the show in all its different spaces, establishing it in the different warehouses, and being involved with the filming. Now in Washington, my hometown, it's been particularly nice for me to introduce them to local audiences. But [from the company] there's still a feeling of, ‘Give us notes. How can we find more in the text? How can we deepen our understanding of Shakespeare and this narrative and how we relate to this space at this moment in time?’ I wouldn't say that every night is different, but every night is a little bit different. I see it every week. I'm always excited to see it and discover more about Shakespeare's genius.

As I was watching, I was thinking about this idea of Shakespeare's comedies and tragedies and how they're often binary, at least in people’s minds. You either go to see a Shakespeare comedy or you see a tragedy. But some moments in the film were comedic. The scene when Macbeth sees the ghost of Banquo, for example. What are your thoughts on that notion of Shakespeare as being only one or the other? Do you think there is room for both in the same play?

I absolutely do, and I think that's why, so often in his tragedies, he puts in comic characters like the Grave Digger in Hamlet. Now, of course, he put the Porter in Macbeth, which we've cut. On one level it seems like an averse thing if I'm interested in witty fusions of the comic and the tragic. But what I've preferred to find in Macbeth is the intrinsic wit. The surrealism of these folks' situation. I think the company and Ralph have discovered a sort of dark, ironic wit through the evening. I don't think the scene with Banquo is ever normally a scene that would raise a smile from an audience. Yet, we've found that the language almost lends itself to that. It does make me think about how, in the Renaissance context of those early performances, audiences were standing up. It was outside. I'm sure they were noisy, and I think they would've probably followed very acutely the movements between the tragic and the comic and the shocking and the strange and the surreal and the banal. When audiences smile or laugh when I do Shakespeare, I'm always delighted because it means they’re listening.

On the opposite side of comedy, this version of the story places a lot of emphasis on the horrors of war. Why were you interested in taking this approach now and how might it resonate with contemporary audiences? 

Traditionally, the war is finished at the beginning of Macbeth. But for us right now, these wars don’t seem to have conventional beginnings and endings. They are prolonged states of trauma. Seeing Macbeth as the aftermath of this conflict that then becomes personalized or domesticized has more to do with the traumatic consequences of these conflicts. 

I feel that it is relevant now. We see different strata of society reacting differently to the horrors they've lived through or are living through. Of course, there is a substantial battle at the end of the play when England invades Scotland and Macbeth is deposed. War is a perpetual presence in Macbeth and we wanted to make that clear because I think it explains a lot about why the characters do what they do.

Macbeth opens in select theaters on May 2. See a clip from the film below.

Photo Credit: Matt Humphrey