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Macbeth - The Ballet

Shakespeare is a daring choice for adaptation and especially when you consider a play like Macbeth with its tremendously powerful poetic structure, it is indeed a risky task to compose a ballet devoid of any verbal utterances to convey, for example, Macbeth’s terrifying inward guilt and moral struggle, without his tremendously powerful soliloquies.

Last Sunday Ravibandu Vidyapathy threw up a brilliant adaptation of Macbeth in ballet form at the Lionel Wendt theatre. The audience comprising mature theatre lovers, filled the hall to almost its full capacity.

If they had any doubts about the ability of a creator of oriental ballets to adapt one of Shakespeare’s most potently dramatic and concentrated tragedies to suit the contemporary Sri Lankan dance theatre, they were dispelled by the convincing and intelligent performance, especially of Ravibandu and Samanthi Ravibandu in their respective roles of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, by superb mime, movement, and dance finely synchronized by the neatly composed individual cameo and group choreography - a richly gathered audio-visual spectacles with terrific drumming and a musical score by Pradeep Ratnayake which made the text yield its traumatic best all the way through.

Shakespeare is a daring choice for adaptation and especially when you consider a play like Macbeth with its tremendously powerful poetic structure, it is indeed a risky task to compose a ballet devoid of any verbal utterances to convey, for example, Macbeth’s terrifying inward guilt and moral struggle, without his tremendously powerful soliloquies.

Ravibandu had to depend totally on the subtle nuances of dance movement, mime, facial expression and background music to create this impact. It was quite evident that the actors who played the roles of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth thought of Shakespearean acting as a process in which your person, as represented by your body, facial expression, movement etc. are also very much engaged in interplay and this enabled them to play their roles convincingly, even without uttering a single word!

In “Is Shakespeare Still Our Contemporary?” edited by John Elsom, several critics raise the issue of the difficulties encountered in translating and adapting Shakespeare and according to them even contemporary British audiences find Shakespeare’s language difficult to understand.

Nevertheless a few Sri Lanka dramatists (Jerome de Silva’s Sinhala version of Macbeth, Tony Ranasinghe’s Julius Caesar, Gamini Haththotuwegama and Haig Karunaratne’s Hamlet in Sinhala to name a few) have endeavoured this daunting task of translating and adapting Shakespeare to our local theatre and some of them have shown by their outstanding success that adaptation and translations of Shakespeare would be a stayer in Sri Lanka, not something going on by rote.

In such a context Ravibandu’s effort is highly laudable and in spite of a few short comings its success would augur well for similar productions.

The opening and the ending were superbly innovative with Macbeth on stage in the uniform of a modern day war general with brass buttons and war emblems, an allegorical figure symbolising modern day power politics. It was the Witches who put a crown on his head, robed him in a red mantle and put a sword in his hand.

I also appreciated the way the director brought out Macbeth again for a final cameo suddenly revealing the Witches appearing from nowhere and taking away everything except the red mantle symbolising the staying power of evil in the soul of one man even after death. Another outstanding scene was the hallucinatory dagger scene where Macbeth portrayed his role as a totally realised experience.

Overall Macbeth and Lady Macbeth gave outstanding performances: Macbeth sliding in and out of the action, so exquisite yet powerful in his dancing movements and facial expressions, Lady Macbeth regal and awe-inspiring in bearing, demeanour and movement.

It would have been touch and go between them if Lady Macbeth had risen to the heights expected of her in the latter half of the ballet. This could have been achieved if she had portrayed her gradual loss of moral balance and the final collapse more convincingly.

Perhaps it was her heavy make up which made her face resemble a mask in Greek drama that hindered her from depicting effectively the pathetic reversal of her situation in the latter half of the ballet.

However, the white clad figure whose dancing movements synchronised perfectly with those of Lady Macbeth’s symbolising her conscience in the sleep waling scene, was an unusual touch, visually exciting as well.

The three Witches remind you of the Furies in Greek drama and they seized their roles immediately and rendered their roles imaginatively. Their importance had been heightened by the director to make the audience feel their presence throughout.

However, Banquo failed to exploit the full potentialities of his role. He needs much rehearsing and polishing up in order to reach the heights designed for him. Macduff and Malcolm’s roles were minimised so much so that they were almost non existent. I think it is an interesting touch which intensified the tragic hopelessness of the play eventhough it almost negated its most redeeming forces (Malcolm and Macduff) at work.

As mentioned earlier, Ravibandu had made certain changes in his trans-creation, some of them leading to an imaginative and interesting interpretation.

However, one main change I did not like was the depiction of Macbeth’s conscience succumbing to external forces rather than to the evil within him, so much so that in certain scenes it was almost implied that evil was forced upon him.

In Macbeth’s second encounter with the Witches its not Macbeth who sought them out, but the Witches who sought him out. It took away some of the tragic impact of this artistic creation.

The stage sets were strikingly simple when compared with the elaborate sets used in School Shakespeare Competitions which rather than enhancing the performances serve to mask the talents of young actors with overdoses of technical gimmicks.

In the Macbeth ballet what stood out impressively were three huge daggers (one should note the matical number three) and the rest of the set-ups comprising a dark, brooding castle, a cave and a withered tree, which framed and highlighted the special setting and the atmosphere of the play and the players’ actions. The production benefited immensely by the superbly selected and executed music by Pradeep Ratnayake.

One final tribute to the plethora of dancers who were beautifully choreographed - Their dance sequences provided a magnificent spectacle all the way through.

All in all the dance troupe of Ravibandu Samanthi Narthanayahanaya seems to be able to unleash a load of talent, a load of skills - in mime, dance, music, synchronised acting, and choreography - yielding altogether a fabulous display of stage craft.

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