“She’s not evil.”
So argued Alex Kingston on Charlie Rose, speaking of the woman, Lady Macbeth, she is currently playing alongside Sir Kenneth Branagh at the Park Avenue Armory production of Macbeth in New York.
I think I know what she means. She means that Lady Macbeth is not born evil, is not fated to do evil, is not someone who is absolutely rotten to the core. She is, Kingston says, a “complex personality.” And so she is. In the interview with Charlie Rose she and Branagh did a good job suggesting the way in which the Macbeths’ lack of children was the primary motivation for their killing spree.
Kingston: “They make a wrong decision on the spur of the moment.”
Charlie Rose: “That’s a big decision, to kill a king!”
Kingston: “But they regret it…”
I’m not sure that Lady Macbeth ever regrets the decision to pursue murderous revenge. She may regret that she loses the confidence of her husband in the process, but not the plan itself. The decision to kill Duncan is also not quite so spur of the moment. Lady Macbeth summons demonic spirits to assist her even before her husband returns home from battle and they begin to scheme and plot.
In any event, in saying that the Macbeths regret their actions Kingston is keen to emphasize the distinction between having a completely evil character and making an evil decision. “If they were just evil, you wouldn’t care.” That’s true. Part of what makes Macbeth so compelling is the way in which two people, whose lives might otherwise have been very different, choose to venture down a path that leads to their destruction.
“I think it’s a far more interesting play,” Kingston continues, “if you see them as good people who’ve gone bad–because everybody can relate to that….There was this little opportunity that was presented to them. It’s the apple!”
But while Kingston is right to underscore the distinction between established (if not fated) character and a single evil decision, the tragedy of Macbeth invites us to ponder the ways in which a single evil decision can lead to further evil decisions which, taken together, transform character into a settled disposition to do evil–even to the point of madness.
(Watch Charlie Rose’s entire interview with Sir Kenneth Branagh, Alex Kingston, and Branagh’s co-director of Macbeth, Rob Ashford, by clicking here. The exchange with Kingston I discuss here begins at about the 38 minute mark.)
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