The Vavasour Macbeth

by Bart Casey

  “That’s wonderful, professor,” said Margaret, trying to wind things up so they could escape. “It’s been a real education, and we probably will want to pester you again after Stephen’s finished his inventory of it all.”

  “Inventory, Stephen? What are you up to?” asked the professor.

  “Well, sir, I’m just organizing the documents—there are well over a hundred separate items, if not more. I assign a brief reference number and then write out a description of the physical size, number of pages, condition—and of course some idea of the content.

  “I’m putting what you taught me to good use, finally. I may not have your skill, professor, but I do want to get it right.”

  “I’m so glad to hear you say it, my boy. Very glad the spirit of the historian has been passed along to you.”

  They all stood up, sensing the finale. “Professor, thanks so much for seeing us,” said Margaret, shaking the old man’s clammy hand.

  “Thank you,” the professor said, in the same up-and-down pattern for the two words as he had used on Stephen’s answer machine. “It’s not every day treasures come back to us from

  the tomb.”

  ~

  “Blimey, he’s a piece of work,” said Margaret after she and Stephen were seated safely back in his car. “I wonder whatever became of your poor fellow student, Penelope. She probably killed herself before she got her degree.”

  “You’re probably right. But congratulations for not letting him have it with both barrels. I do think we got some great information out of the old boy. Sorry to find out your Anne was a bit of a loose woman, but I think she seems rather wonderful. She’d have to have been, to keep Sir Henry Lee in thrall for over twenty years. It’s a wonderful love story, don’t you think?”

  “Yes, I do,” said Margaret who was really in the mood for a great love story, perhaps now more than ever.

  Very early Monday morning, Stephen left Margaret sleeping at the vicarage and slipped out from the guest room to his day job at St. George’s. He had been trying to step away from most of his hands-on obligations at the school, but today there was one commitment he couldn’t get out of, and didn’t want to: taking thirty of his fifth- and sixth-form students on a long planned field trip to Stratford-upon-Avon.

  He had the idea for this trip himself, and the plan was now to make this pilgrimage a regular yearly event at the school. For the fifth formers, it would energize their last two years at the school, and for the sixth, it would be a memorable start to their send-off year before they had to begin three or four very structured years elsewhere to lead them through the curriculum for the compulsory GCE and A-level exams that would determine where they might continue on to college. For all of them, Stephen wanted to heighten their appreciation for great literature so they wouldn’t just sleep through their textbooks in the future. And what better way to open their eyes than to put them on their feet in a rehearsal room for an interactive workshop on Macbeth run by the country’s premier acting troupe, the Royal Shakespeare Company.

  Also, this was just the sort of innovative activity that had made St. Anne’s headmistress, Mrs. Boardman, think that joining with the boys of St. George’s might just take her own girls to a different level. She would be partnering with Stephen today as the co-leader of the trip, along with two classroom English teachers, Mister Meakins and Miss Davies, who worked with the students every day.

  Mrs. Boardman was a charmingly professional lady in her late forties, who thought it was “very interesting” that her new partner in coeducation was a strapping and handsome young man not yet thirty. More important, she was impressed with Stephen for all he had achieved turning St. George’s around, and for his vision of a brighter future for both of their schools. Early on, when planning the merger, she had some concerns about the disparity in salaries among the combined staff, but Stephen reworked all the numbers so the underpaid could simply be brought up to a compatible higher level—and who could complain about getting a raise? And he had also demonstrated, quite clearly, how all that could be achieved within the joint budget they had already agreed for running the school. So the business issues seemed sound, the staff and students were positively excited, and this field trip was just a taste of what might lie ahead for everyone.

  Stephen drove into the parking lot at St. George’s just as the first students were arriving and taking their places on the waiting motor coach for the trip. He walked over to Mister Meakins, who was by the door of the coach ticking off the names on the trip list, and started chatting about how the integration of the boys and girls seemed to be going, as seen from the front lines.

  “Well,” said Mister Meakins, “we have a lot less of the usual daydreaming and fidgeting among the boys. I’ve noticed they seem to be sitting up very straight and alert—as if someone was watching them very carefully. And they’re right, because the girls can’t seem to take their eyes off of them,” he laughed.

  “And the girls?” asked Stephen.

  “They seem very comfortable. Like a pack of lionesses taking the measure of the zebras.”

  “My god,” Stephen said with a laugh, “perhaps we should introduce a whole new set of self-defense lessons during P.E.”

  “Maybe the boys will be alerted to the dangers by Macbeth,” added Mister Meakins. “I mean, the man probably wouldn’t have gone through with everything without a push from his lady.”

  “Too true,” said Stephen.

  Just then Mrs. Boardman drove up, and Stephen went to greet her.

  “Good morning,” she said, alighting from her car.

  “Yes, good morning,” he replied. “We seem to have a good day for it.”

  “Stephen, if you don’t mind, I thought you and I should go along together in my car—not yours—if that’s all right?”

  “Yes. You’ll be glad to know I’ve already placed the order for a Volvo sedan for myself,” said Stephen. “I’m saying goodbye to the Mini—although I’ll probably just keep it in the garage in case I have some sort of crisis.”

  “Very good.” She laughed. “The bigger one is just better for me now, sadly.”

  Within the next twenty minutes, the whole group had assembled and checked in, and then Stephen and Mrs. Boardman pulled out of the parking lot together in her car behind the rented coach. Once on the motorway they pulled ahead so they could arrive first, park, and announce themselves. The boys and girls smiled and waved from the coach windows as they flew by.

  They arrived in the town center in less than two hours and well before the planned 10:30 a.m. start. Even though September 14 was outside the busiest tourist season, the place still seemed frantic with visitor activity. Stephen was glad Mrs. Boardman would be parking her car in a reserved visitor spot at the tiny Shakespeare Memorial Theatre car park, next to their

  school coach.

  As they came in sight of their goal, Stephen realized whatever playbook the Shakespeare Trust had used to make the town appear Elizabethan must have been missing when they erected the red-brick Memorial Theatre back in the 1930s, according to Elisabeth Scott’s winning design from a heated architectural competition. The local history captured comments ranging from “an insult to Shakespeare...like a tomb...so very ugly” to “heartwarming.” Finally, after George Bernard Shaw approved, “many lesser people felt that not to do so would be rather dating.” So the bold structure went forward and to Stephen, as they pulled in to the private car park, it looked like later generations had planted very large trees all around it to obscure the full effect of the rectangular austerity as much as they could. Nevertheless, it was a massive and spectacular brick and glass presence sitting in a manicured park beside the River Avon, with dozens of signature swans swimming around below the jutting balconies outside its cafeteria and vestibules.

  Mrs. Boardman, Stephen, and the teachers had worked with the Royal Shakespeare Company educational staff all summer to fashion their workshop on Macbeth, a play that all of the students knew well. The RSC was providing
a seasoned older actor as a facilitator and two younger members of the acting company to work beside the students for the whole session: Brian, who was a slim, pale, and short-haired copy of most of the boys from the school in the room (but ten years older); and Tessie, who was strikingly exotic, with beautiful ebony-colored skin, cornrowed hair, and the graceful moves of a dancer.

  Filing off the coach after the journey, the boys and girls happily marched inside the vast theater and into a private area behind the main stage, where they left their things in a cloakroom. The group moved into a large rehearsal room just beside. It was a well-lit windowless room, with a floor-to-ceiling mirror along one wall; a few folding chairs were arranged around the edges, intended for Stephen, Mrs. Boardman, and the teachers to sit and observe.

  The kids stood milling around in the center of the room as the actors moved from cluster to cluster to chat and meet everyone before getting started.

  Soon the older actor facilitating took charge. “Right, everyone. Welcome to the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre and our Macbeth workshop. I hope you’ve all met Brian and Tessie, our actors here to work with you today—you’ll be seeing lots of them from now on. My name is John and I’ve been with the Royal Shakespeare Company for fifteen years, and I’ll be moving us all through our paces. So now just sit down—right there on the floor—and get as comfortable as you can while I talk for a few minutes. You won’t be sitting down too much today, so you might as well stretch out now and relax.”

  John explained the program. The RSC and their school had chosen Macbeth because, among other things, it had a strong juxtaposition of the leading woman’s role and the leading man’s role, and, as John understood it, the boy and girl students here today had only recently come together in a combined coeducational school—”so gender roles must seem very interesting to all of you. Indeed.”

  John went on. First he would talk through a three-minute recap of the play and then they would have an opening exercise. After that, they would break up into five groups of six, boys and girls together. Everyone was then going to focus on three key moments in the play. First, Lady Macbeth’s opening scene, when she reads a letter from her husband about his success and promotion. That’s when she decides she’s going to get him to kill the king since the witches have promised he’ll get the crown. Next, they’ll move on to the scene when Lady Macbeth persuades her doubting husband to find the courage to murder the king. And finally they’ll finish after the crime with the scene with all the blood.

  But first, there was the opening exercise. John had everyone stand and sort themselves into two groups of fifteen. Actor Brian would take one group out of the room stage left, and actress Tessie would take the others out stage right. They were going to trot out the door and follow the actors jogging up five flights of stairs. Then they would cross over the top of the actual main stage of the theater, moving across the lighting gangway just under the roof of the soaring building, then down the stairs on the other side and back here into the rehearsal room. The idea was to get everyone’s blood going, and shake any cobwebs off from the two-hour bus ride. “Now off you go,” ended John.

  After the kids trotted away behind the actors. John then came over to Stephen, Mrs. Boardman, and the teachers and showed them the handouts the group would be using for the first scene. The RSC had selected seventeen consecutive lines from the speech Lady Macbeth makes in her opening letter-reading scene just after she has decided to murder King Duncan. Those five sentences that had been typed out as five separate handouts—one for each working group of six kids. The speech was parsed out as follows:

  The raven himself is hoarse

  That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan

  Under my battlements.

  Come, you spirits

  That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,

  And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full

  Of direst cruelty!

  Make thick my blood;

  Stop up the access and passage to remorse,

  That no compunctuous visitings of nature

  Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between

  The effect and it.

  Come to my woman’s breasts,

  And take my milk for gall, you murdering ministers,

  Wherever in your sightless substances,

  You wait on nature’s mischief!

  Come, thick night,

  And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell,

  That my keen knife see not the wound it makes,

  Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark,

  To cry “Hold, hold!”

  The students were coming back from their stair exercise by now and John settled them into their small work groups of six each and read through the whole speech once aloud so they could hear it all together. Brian and Tessie handed out the copies along with markers.

  “Right,” said John. “Each group now has one of these sentences. I want each of you to read through it, and underline the words or phrase you think to be the most important on your page.” After a minute he continued, “All right. Anyone care to share?”

  Several hands went up and John chose a boy sitting right next to him. “All right there, what words did you choose?”

  “‘Direst cruelty,’” said the boy.

  “Why those?”

  “Because they show she is asking for the very worst—to be filled with the worst sort of cruelty so she can do something terrible.”

  “Okay,” said John. “And your name is...?”

  “James.”

  “Right, James, would you mind standing up now and say those words with some sort of gesture or movement that you think Lady Macbeth might use to get her point across.”

  The boy stood up somewhat tentatively, but with Tessie smiling, giving hints, and encouraging him, he managed to bend his arms, make his hands into fists, bend forward from the waist, and say “direst cruelty” through clenched teeth.

  “That’s good,” said John. “Just the right idea. Now I think that was about a ‘two.’ Why not do it again and this time make it be a ‘five.’ Really go for it. Remember, she wants to commit murder.”

  The boy took a deep breath and spat out “direst cruelty” with real venom as he thrust his fists forward—in fact, his face turned red and he almost fell over.

  “That’s it. Well done,” said John. “Anyone else?”

  A girl in the same group thrust up her hand.

  “Yes, all right. And your name is...?”

  “Sarah.”

  “Sarah, what words did you choose from the same passage?”

  “I chose ‘unsex me here,’” said Sarah, shaking her ponytail off the side of her face and flicking it to the back of her head as she looked up at John.

  Mrs. Boardman leaned over to Stephen and said, “Well, I think she’s got everyone’s attention now.” Stephen nodded, looking closely at the kids, who seemed transfixed, as were the teachers.

  “Right, well done,” said John. “And what do you think Lady Macbeth meant by that?”

  “Well, she’s a woman...and I think she means she wants the gods to take all that womanness out of her, so she can do something really horrible and unnatural—like murder.”

  “Okay, Sarah, can you stand up now and put a gesture to that for us?”

  The girl stood as all eyes in the room were fixed on her. She balanced herself evenly on the balls of her feet, closed her eyes, and raised her arms above her shoulders. And then, as she almost shouted “unsex me here,” she brought her hands down, moving them in semicircles across the front of her body, then down and back out to the sides of her knees in a flowing motion, bending her knees and springing back up as she said “here.”

  “Brilliant,” said John. “Say something about that.”

  “Well, I meant to show I was taking everything inside me that makes me a woman and then washing it out of me, so I would be free of all that later when I did what I had to do.”

  “Okay,” said John. “That�
�s excellent. Now, would the rest of your group please stand up with you here? I want you all to put together the two things that James and Sarah just said and did as we chant that full line. As you can see on your handouts, the line is ‘unsex me here, / And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full / Of direst cruelty.’ When you say ‘unsex me here,’ make Sarah’s motion and then try to flow into James’s gesture by the time you end on ‘direst cruelty.’ I’ll do it along with you. Okay, let’s give it a try now.”

  John led them, chanting the single line and going through the motions as a group. “All right, that’s our ‘two.’ Now, let’s do it again now and go for our ‘five.’”

  He was right: the first go was not bad, but the second one was much better—and everyone could see how the motions brought out the meaning. There was quite a lot of murmuring going on as the onlookers whispered with one another about how effective the exercise had been.

  “Well, we certainly went from a ‘two’ to a ‘four,’ so now keep working with it among yourselves and take it higher. And now everyone in the other groups, get going on underlining the key words and phrases in your sentences and then work together on the motions. Brian, Tessie, and I will be coming ’round to you to help. So let’s take time now and work on all that.”

  “That was very impressive,” said Mrs. Boardman to her fellow teachers. “It just shows the difference between simply reading the script and acting the play.”

  “Yes,” said Mister Meakins. “Perhaps we should actually have the students work just this way on these sorts of things in our classroom?”

  “Indeed,” said Stephen, very impressed at what he had just seen.