A landscape where emotion is interwoven with sound, image and materiality on stage: Alessandro Serra's adaptation of Macbeth

Waiting for MACBETTU, July, 13rd 2024, Teatro Lirico di Cagliari-Sardinia

© Mehmet Kerem Özel

In the middle of summer, with the humid heat of July raging everywhere, I set off for a weekend in Cagliari, the capital of the island of Sardinia in the middle of the Mediterranean. My aim was to see a show that, since its premiere in March 2017, has had 350 performances around the world in seven years, from Peru to Japan, from Finland to China, from Azerbaijan to Bosnia-Herzegovina, from Russia to Brazil, as well as many cities in its home island of Sardinia and its home country of Italy. This show was MACBETTU, long after its last performance in 2022, returning from a one and a half month, four-stop tour of the Far East, and after many years in its own city for a single performance on 13 July 2024. Inspired by the carnival traditions of the island of Sardinia and translated into Limba, the local language of the island (the translation belongs to Giovanni Carroni, one of the actors in the show), MACBETTU, co-produced by Compagnia Teatropersona and Teatro Sardegna, was adapted from Shakespeare's famous play Macbeth by the Italian theatre director Alessandro Serra, who also designed the set, lighting and costumes. 

The stage is pitch black when the curtain opens, and throughout the show this darkness is illuminated at most like a chiaroscuro painting. Behind the stage is a vaguely square surface, dark grey in colour. As the show progresses, we will realise that this surface, which is the only element of the play's simple and functional set, can be divided into four long strips and that its material is metal, thanks to the sound it makes when tapped as part of the play's soundscape. This surface will be a wall, a door, columns, and when turned from vertical to horizontal it will become banquet tables, and when separated a walking forest will emerge from its gaps. 

In the opening scene, after a sound like the rumbling of an earthquake, coming from deep inside and gradually increasing in intensity to fill the darkness, we notice figures moving awkwardly on the surface, trying to be fluid; they have obviously climbed from the back to the top of the surface and are trying to get to the front. They are three women in black dresses with black skirts and black headscarves. Three witches. Macbeth's witches. It is in this first scene that Serra first grips us, first surprises us: The witches are men and they have beards. Moreover, they are not frightening, but funny; not skilful, but clumsy; rude, stupid and teasing each other. In Serra's Macbeth, the three witches are the antipodes of the bloody, cruel, frightening and serious Macbeth story, making us laugh, comforting us, easing and lowering the tension every time they appear.

The main material of Serra's Macbeth narrative is not Shakespeare's words. Yes, there is a text in MACBETTU, but the main elements that construct the narrative are sounds, images and materials. 

Sounds; The strange, eerie, unsettling music of the show, appropriate to the world of Macbeth, was composed by Marcellino Garau using Pietre Sonore (Sound Stones)* by the sculptor Pinuccio Sciola, but not only this composition, but also the sounds the actors make with the materials on the stage (hitting metal surfaces with their hands, banging stones together, stepping on thin, crispy slices of bread) and the sounds they make with their own bodies, especially the way they use the pitch and fullness of the sounds coming from their mouths... 

Images; the atmosphere of chiaroscuro that Serra, who is also a photographer, creates on the stage with his lighting design, the composition and balance created by the positioning and movement of the characters on stage, axes, diagonals, crowds and singularities... One of the most powerful images in the show, for example, is Lady Macbeth's death scene: In the darkness, visible only by the light reflected on it, a body on its feet, naked, but half a body. Its face is turned towards one of the metal surfaces and half of it is visible because it is leaning against it from the side. Ans suddenly, this body, the body of Lady Macbeth rises very slowly into the air along the surface on which she is leaning; it is as if she is hanging herself on this wall. 

Materials: living objects such as the human body and inanimate objects such as stone, metal, earth, bread. In fact, it is not so much the materials themselves, but why they are chosen, how they are used, how their physicality is revealed in relation to each other and to sound and image, that makes the final product breathtaking. MACBETTU's strong relationship with its site, unparalleled in any other geography, in any other culture, almost to the point of deserving the term 'site-specific', has been established thanks to these materials, most of which have significance in the local cultural geography. One of these, for example, is pane carasau, which I later learned is a bread specific to the island of Sardinia, made of wafer-thin leaves. In the dinner scene where Banquo appears as a ghost to Macbeth, the atmosphere created by the fragile, crunching sound coming from Banquo's feet as he walks from one end to the other of the long, thin table covered with pane carasau; "the uncanny" that arises precisely from the different use of an everyday object conveys the feeling of this scene to us.

In MACBETTU, the emotion of each scene is created by the interweaving of these three elements: sound, image and material. Thus, for 95 minutes, an incredibly dense acoustic, visual and physical landscape passes before our eyes, through the depths of our body, our heart, our abdominal cavity, our world of thoughts and emotions. Each part of the landscape is not only influential, but organically connected to each other, one scene flowing into the next, as if the pan of a camera; it is as if we were sitting on the train watching the landscape passes by outside. 

The emotion created by the analogue elements on stage for each scene leaves you both amazed and fascinated. Let me illustrate this with a few scenes: For example, the slit in the thin layer of earth that covers the floor when King Duncan, who has just been killed and is lying in the centre of the stage parallel to the audience, is pulled out of the stage invisibly, creates such a strong feeling. 

Or, the image of the three witches hanging upside down like bats, feet crossed, on the long, thin steel table, needs no words at all to describe the difference/inversion in the witches' view of the world and the existing order. 

Another: When King Duncan visits the castle of the Macbeths, the "swine" in Lady Macbeth's words "... his two chamberlains / Will I with wine and wassail so convince / That memory, the warder of the brain, / Shall be a fume, and the receipt of reason / A limbeck only. When in swinish sleep / Their drenchèd natures lies as in a death, / What cannot you and I perform upon / Th’ unguarded Duncan? ..." for Duncan's guards are overlaid with the fact that all the banquet guests, who are all naked men, eat on all fours from the large bowl on the floor where Lady Macbeth pours wine, making noises like pigs. 

One of the most effective elements of the piece is that in a production where all the roles are played by men, as in Shakespeare's time, Lady Macbeth is played by an actor (Fulvio Accogli, unique for his physique and aura) who is much taller than the other men in the play, with much longer hair and a much longer beard; so that in the scenes with Macbeth, played by a bald actor (Felice Montervino, impressive in his hesitation, confusion and resignation to his fate), she, a head taller than him, embraces him, caresses him, manipulates him, treats him like a child. Isn't that so; even though it was the prophecies he heard from the witches that drove him to commit the murders he did, isn't it Lady Macbeth who gave him the real courage and convinced him by insulting him as "...art thou afeard / To be the same in thine own act and valour / As thou art in desire?..." ? 

Macbeth's shouting of his own name as "Maccc-be-tttuuuu" several times in the play reminds me of a child being called by an adult, lost in the woods and being searched for, as well as a child being afraid of the night/darkness and trying to overcome his fear by shouting his own name. This is also why Macbeth and Banquo pretend to ride an imaginary horse like children when they go to the king from the witches in the very first scenes, and why the throne Macbeth sits on after King Duncan dies is a small chair. Serra's Macbeth is like a man who has not grown up, who has remained a child. But it is not limited to him, the whole masculine world in the narrative of Serra seems to be constructed in this way.

On the one hand, there is a wild, primitive, even primordial atmosphere on stage, but on the other, it is timeless. For example, the costumes are typical Italian peasant dress, with black waistcoats, trousers, hats and white shirts. The Birnam Forest does not walk, but figures/mens with huge, shapeless masks on their heads, whose rattles sound as they walk, emerge from behind the stage.***

Applause for MACBETTU, July, 13rd 2024, Teatro Lirico di Cagliari-Sardinia

© Mehmet Kerem Özel

At a time when all kinds of digital technologies are used in the performing arts, Alessandro Serra has created a tectonic show that we feel with every part of our body, with every sense, rooted in the arte povera movement, which is based on using matter itself in the most concise and minimal way. 

Serra, who has a degree in Art and Performance Studies from the Sapienza University of Rome and whose acting training is based on Grotowski's tradition of physical action and vibratory singing, as well as Meyerhold and Decroux's teachings on physical movement, has been appreciated not only in his own country but also around the world for years with MACBETTU, where he has skillfully combined all this knowledge and more. 

Among many other awards, in 2017 Serra received the award of the Association of Theatre Critics in Italy, "Performance of the Year" at the prestigious theatre awards UBU, "Best Performance" at the Baltic Theatre Festival in St Petersburg, and the awards for best production, director and critics at the 58th International MESS Theatre Festival in Sarajevo. 

In addition to Serra, the success of this extraordinarliy impressive play can be attributed to the work of the movement collaborator Chiara Michelini and the eight qualified performers, namely Stefano Mereu, Maurizio Giordo, Alessandro Burzotta, Jared Mc Neill, Salvatore Drago and Mirko Iurlaro, in addition to Montervino and Accogli, whom I have already specially mentioned.

It is uncertain whether MACBETTU will be revived, but Serra's latest show, a co-production between Teatro Sardegna and Compagnia Teatropersona, Tragùdia - The Song of Oedipus, a myth freely inspired by the works of Sophocles and other sources, will tour Italy and Europe next season. Serra also organises occasional workshops in Cagliari. They are well worth following.

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* Pietre Sonore (Sound Stones) are the monumental blocks of stone on which the sculptor Pinuccio Sciola cut thin slits of different geometries and depths, and which have been on display since 1968 in the museum and garden he founded in his name in the town of San Sperate on the island of Sardinia.

*** During my research after the show, I learned that Serra's masked and rattling figures were inspired by the 2,000-year-old Mamuthon carnival, which is still held annually in villages in the Barbagia region of Sardinia. The masks in the show are not identical in shape to those used in the carnival; in fact, they are quite original designs. They are also different in terms of the material used; those used in the carnival are made of wood, while those used in the show are made of cork shells.

[The original version in Turkish was published on unlimited.]