Lyric Opera 2021-2022 Issue 1 Macbeth

Lyric Opera of Chicago | 31 A cloistered Macbeth For an opera so steeped in foggy highlands that its source material is known to superstitious theater insiders as “the Scottish play,” Lyric Opera of Chicago tapped two proud Scotsmen, Sir David McVicar and John Macfarlane, to create a new production to spark the 2021/22 season— Lyric’s return to live mainstage performance after 18 months dark. The duo’s vision for the opera keeps the action in Scotland, but changes the historical time period and restricts the setting to a ruined Presbyterian chapel. Director McVicar and set designer Macfarlane have not situated Lyric’s new Macbeth in the eleventh century of the historical Macbeth, who had little to do with Shakespeare’s tragedy, anyway. Nor did they choose the early seventeenth century, which was when Shakespeare’s play premiered near the start of the reign of James I, who ascended to the uni ed throne of England and Scotland in middle age after reigning in Scotland from toddlerhood. Instead, McVicar and Macfarlane have placed the production in the mid- nineteenth century—a Scotland that is contemporaneous with Verdi’s revised Macbeth . Lyric is performing the 1865 score, called the “Paris revision” because of its debut at the Théâtre Lyrique in Paris (the original version premiered in 1847). The Presbyterian chapel serves as the setting for all scenes in this production; even the witches’ Sabbath heretically takes place within the sacred walls. The banquet scene, during which Macbeth and Lady Macbeth invite the noble thanes of Scotland to extol Macbeth’s reign, shows the church as a community space. At the close of the opera, it serves as the last redoubt for Macbeth against the advancing army camou aged with the boughs of Birnam Wood. A church is a place of good and evil, legend and myth, and a place to impart lore and morality. Centering this production in the chapel signals moral instability, as the witches practice dark arts within its walls. Macbeth strides into a roiling, vibrating tension created by these dichotomies, and drawn downward by his political ambition—with his wife egging him on—makes his (im)moral choices. All suffer the consequences. The chapel space is modi ed throughout the production to indicate scene changes or reorient the audience’s perspective. In the opera’s opening, the prophesying witches sit in the pews, facing the house. For Act II, the church is turned around so that viewers face the altar to hear the Macbeths plotting Banquo’s murder. The furniture is reset for a banquet, then placed in disarray for the witches’ Sabbath, then cleared away entirely. A wall is removed for the nal act, which allows the audience to see Malcolm’s advancing army on the horizon amid a ery backdrop, hand-painted by Macfarlane. Macfarlane, an accomplished artist who regularly shows in U.K. galleries, painted the backdrops and the front curtain. The single-location conceit of the staging means shunning many typical Macbeth trappings. There are no lavish castles, witchy caves, or desperate heaths. For the feast scene, the meager decorations added to the space— smallish portraits, a few pennants—situate the celebration as more of a dreary church tea than a magni cent meal. Instead of the standard alternation between gloomy, sinister milieus and royal grandeur, the aesthetic is uniformly stark. The chapel setting, a conduit with the divine, ampli es the story’s prominent supernatural elements, particularly in Act III when apparitions foretell Macbeth’s future and witches sing and dance around a cauldron that rises out of the oor. The women of the community return to practice witchcraft, diabolically distorting the sacredness of the By Graham Meyer The single-location conceit of the staging means shunning many typical Macbeth trappings.There are no lavish castles, witchy caves, or desperate heaths.