Just Macbeth!

I'm crazy about Shakespeare and I'm also crazy about Bell Shakespeare, Australia's own Shakespeare acting company. I love watching them act in the big theatre, the Playhouse, in Melbourne's Arts Centre. I usually go there twice a year to see the two new plays in the subscription season.

This year I made an extra trip to the theatre to see them do Andy Griffith's Just Macbeth! in the school holidays.


Andy Griffiths is also the author of a number of very funny books for kids including The Bum Series.

Bums and all their noisy and smelly manifestations feature quite prominently in Just Macbeth! Just the thing for a people of refined tastes such as myself and Badger, my seven-year-old companion.

Bum jokes, wee wee, snot, stuff poked up your nose and into your mouth (and out the other end), wizz fizz potions that send you and your mates reeling from a boring classroom lesson into the mayhem of Macbeth's world. Onto the dark side with daggers and dripping blood, ghosts, witches and madness. And poetry.

The juxtaposition of evil and brutal action alongside sublime poetry is one of Shakespeare's greatest achievements in Macbeth. As Macbeth slashes his way to absolute power he horrifies the audience, but also entrances us with the beauty of his words:

I am in blood
Stepp'd in so far that, should I wade no more,
Returning were as tedious as go o'er.

Nightmares of guilt send Lady Macbeth right over the top into madness and have Macbeth lilting on the balm of sleep now lost to him:

Macbeth does murder sleep - the innocent sleep,
Sleep that knits up the ravell'd sleave of care,
The death of each day's life, sore labour's bath,
Balm of hurt minds, great nature's second course,
Chief nourisher in life's feast.

In silly Just Macbeth!, the brilliant poetry of many of Shakespeare's best lines emerge through the veil of Macbeth's dark deeds and the riotous comedy on the stage. In this context their beauty is even more stark and amazing.