Ivan Donato and Kate Mulvany stand in a hallway while a film crew bustles around them.
Onscreen text reads 'Shakespeare Unbound — Macbeth 1.7 — In conversation with Kate Mulvany'.
Shot of Kate Mulvany being interviewed by James Evans.
JAMES EVANS:
In the scene that we just saw, Macbeth makes up his mind at the end of that speech not to kill the king. And then Lady Macbeth comes in and at the end of the scene he decides he will kill the king. What kind of tactics does she use throughout the scene to convince him?
KATE MULVANY:
Well, she uses her… She belittles him as a man. She belittles him as a man within society and within the relationship. She uses the child, the fact that they've had a child and she says she would've killed that child.
Shot of Kate and Ivan performing Act 1, Scene VII of Macbeth.
KATE MULVANY:
And if she can do that, why can't he kill this king?
JOHN BELL:
She really is sort of demolishing his image of himself. He has this image of himself as this great warrior and she's saying, 'You're not. And what's more, I will withdraw my commitment to you if you don't go through with this, because you've promised to do it.'
Shot of John Bell of Bell Shakespeare in an empty theatre.
JOHN BELL:
So she puts him, really, under extraordinary pressure and also, at the end, the sweetener of 'It's gonna be easy. We're gonna get away with it.' And she convinces him that they can. So her power of persuasion and the tactic she uses are very spontaneous and extremely clever. And we should see Macbeth in that scene undergoing an extraordinary conversion and conviction that it has to happen.
KATE MULVANY:
I think Lady Macbeth knows Macbeth better than Macbeth knows himself sometimes, and definitely better than he knows her. And so when he gets up and leaves that dinner, I think she's right on it. Whatever choice he makes in that corridor outside, she is… she's kind of expecting it, I think. And she's probably got her speech worked out well beforehand just in case this happens. So, at one point in the play, she says to Macbeth, 'You are too full of the milk of human kindness to catch the nearest way.' So she really does see in him a caramel heart, a softness, that I think is in her too but because of whatever's going on in their lives at the moment, it's been hidden and there's no time or place for that at the moment. The ambition is too strong.
JAMES EVANS:
Now, obviously there's a question hanging over this play as to whose fault is it that everything goes so horribly wrong. Is it Lady Macbeth? Is it Macbeth's fault? Is it the Weird Sisters? Is it Duncan's weak leadership? What's your take on that?
KATE MULVANY:
I think it's a bit of everything, except the Weird Sisters. I don't think it's anything to do with them. I think they are just a form of suggestion. They're almost a form of warning, of 'Be careful'. But instead it's ambition, it's jealous ambition. There's nothing wrong with ambition but this is a form of ambition… There's something very wrong with it. It's poisonous. And every single character has a little bit of poisoned ambition in them, I think, and they throw darts at each other through the entire play and then someone has to fall. They're too filled with poison.