I’m getting a lot of requests for the Macbeth story, which I’m sure I’ve told before but an old classic never dies.
Welp, might as well do something while I’m on the bus. Excuse any typos, typing on mobile is hard.
In news that will surprise no one, I was a drama school kid. I didn’t so much like to perform, but I did enjoy writing scripts and being the occasional narrator or background person.
In 5th year English class we were assigned a group project of retelling Shakespeare in six minutes or less. I rewrote the entire of Macbeth in a series of rhyming couplets, which by happy happenstance, synced up perfectly with Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain” (”yooooou’re so vain, I betcha think this throne is bound to you, don’t you, don’t you”) which is what the group sung it as, while my favorite English teacher (the one who did the Lord of the Flies experiment with us) sat with his head in his hands, occasionally making noises like he was crying.
If I ever find those notes I’ll let you know, but that’s not what this story is about, but it is where it started. Cause I won an award for that hot garbage, and found myself propelled into the actual drama class in sixth year because of it and that’s when shit got weird.
First of all, everyone knows you don’t call it Macbeth around actual drama people, you call it The Scottish Play because of the well established curse. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scottish_Play)
Which is what we all being good Scottish superstitious kids did. We called it “The Scottish Play” and never spoke any lines unless we were rehearsing cause that’s just what you do. And when your school is built less than a mile away from an iron age fairy mound and was built on the site of what used to be an old laird’s house that mysteriously burned down in the late 1800s and was subsequently rumored to be haunted, ye dinnae fuck wi fate like that.
Unless of course, your name was Mister Hadley, and you were a) newly arrived from England and b) didn’t believe in superstition and c) took every opportunity possible to spit in the face of the gods and call it MACBETH like you had nothing left to lose.
And this is my stop so I’ll post more when I get home.
Okay home now, lets do this.
So Mister Hadley was a hip young thing, or at least he likely hoped he was. He would show up every day regardless of the weather wearing sandals under his dress trousers, and trying to hang out with us like we were his friends and not his students. He was, in hindsight, the exact type of smiling, friendly lech who thought Woody Allen was the pinnacle of genius and was likely writing a novel about a teacher who has a love affair with one of his students. And he hated superstition. Like, HATED. And he really hated that we kept correcting him whenever he called Macbeth, Macbeth while in the theater room. To the point where one day while standing on the stage, he got really exasperated and started yelling “MACBETH, MACBETH, MACBETH! There, see nothing bad happened! I mean, what could possibly go wrong?”
It’s subtle at first, like half the supporting cast coming down with mono the first month into rehearsals. Not an unusual thing of itself for a bunch of 17 year olds in close contact all the time.
But after that things get progressively weirder and wilder. And perhaps you might argue it was something of the Salem witch trials hysteria effect taking hold, and maybe it was. But let me tell you, it’s hard not to start having hysterics when one day in the middle of rehearsing her “out damn spot!” soliloquy, Lady MacB almost gets taken out by a falling stage light that plummets out of the darkness of the ceiling and smashes through the floor like an acme anvil falling through thin ice. It was so loud several teachers came running down to the auditorium cause they thought something had exploded, but all they found was Lady MacB standing frozen in the center of the stage covered in dust, starting at her upraised hand where she’d felt the falling metal whistle past her fingertips, and all of us staring at her realizing we’d almost watched out friend get crushed to death by falling stage apparatus. The school had to call in a second councilor after that.
And I mean, you’d think after that the school would think better of hosting this end of year play. You’d think. But after the room was inspected and repaired and the falling light deemed a freak accident we went right back to it. Persevering through random fire sprinkler mishaps that soaked the stage and scenery (not to mention the electrics), my friend Mark who was Lord MacB getting thrown against a window in a fight and falling out of it when it shattered. And several other small mishaps which by themselves wouldn’t have mattered, but when you compiled them all into one stressed out space, became completely overwhelming to the point where people left.
The cast began dropping like flies, their final grades be damned. Some others who needed to complete the class for their chosen elective the following year stuck around out of desperation. And then there were the ones like me, just there for the shit-show and to see who would be left standing at the end up. We all used to huddle together in the drama room on the 2nd floor after rehearsals, survivors of this mutual train wreck of a monument to our teacher’s ego, carrying salt in our pockets and throwing it over our left shoulders whenever we talked about the play even though we never said its name.
Mister Hadley
did though. All the time. Repeatedly. Even when we begged him not to.
Cause you see guys, this is Mister Hadley’s vision and nothing
small like 15 kids coming down with mono or having near death experiences is going to stop him. So I get
moved from helping to rewrite lines of this Modern adaptation which is
shaping up like Trainspotting meets Willy Wonka down a dark alleyway,
and I wind up on the raised podium off at the side wearing a black hat
and holding a broom. The irony of which was not lost on me or half my
friends, but hey, it’s supposed to be good luck to have a “real” witch
acting as one of the witches, maybe that’ll save us.
You might be thinking at this point, “buy Joy, what did your parents have to say about any of this, why was no one doing anything?”
Have you ever tried to tell your parents “our drama teacher cursed us all by saying Macbeth instead of The Scottish Play and now we’re all going to die”? I have. My mother said “no you’re not, dear” while my dad said “that’s nice, dear” and carried on reading his book. They genuinely did not believe us, and attributed it to “high spirits” and general shenanigans.
Until opening night that is, when the curtains lifted, and Lord MacB is standing there with his shredded arm in a sling, (there are pictures of this and I have been facebooking friends all night trying to get hold of them)
Lady MacB keeps looking up at the ceiling like she has a nervous tick, and everyone else is just plain god damn miserable and more than a little wild around the eyes.
But we get through it. Nothing else bad happens and no one nearly dies. Right until the very end, when
Mister Hadley
gets up on the stage to address our horrified looking parents to thank them for coming, says “ladies and gentlemen, thank you for coming to tonight’s performance of Macb—” loses his footing, and promptly falls off the stage and breaks his leg.
And that’s the story of my schools first—and last—official performance of The Scottish Play.
