By Judith Gayle | Political Waves
I like to watch Charlie Rose on PBS, not because I’m a big Rose fan but because — in this age of sound bites, tweets and wall-pinning — one becomes privy to a full, hopefully in-depth conversation. Or mostly, anyhow. I feel the same way about Charlie as I did about Phil Donahue, back in the day: he’s really good at what he does until he hits his own personal wall of understanding, and then we’re all blocked from moving farther down the road. Because I’ve always been eager for that bit of conversation on the other side of the roadblock, I’ve been known to disturb fellow watchers by upbraiding the host at length when that gate swings shut.
This week Rose interviewed Kenneth Branagh on the final days of his production of MacBeth at the Park Avenue Armory in New York. MacBeth, like King Lear, is one of those epic plays that serious actors must mature into and Branagh and his Lady MacBeth, Alex Kingston, spoke to that issue, as well as their feeling that their characters aren’t so evil as they are passionate players at life and love, caught up in an epic mistake (murder) for which their guilt and regret ultimately destroy them.
As Joseph Campbell put it, “Regrets are illuminations come too late.” Key words: too late. Makes for a messy end. That’s a very nuanced reading of the Shakespearean classic, more often portraying MacBeth and his Lady as ambitious, conniving and unredeemedly villainous. No denying the couple were killers and, yes, they paid the price in madness and death. Probably the reason that even during those repressive periods of history in which Shakespeare fell out of fashion, the church approved MacBeth as a “morality play” that aligned with it’s own notions of sin and the sure punishment of the Almighty.