Macbeth in Color

For the eye, last week's NBC-TV Macbeth was a triumph. The camera work was so carefully plotted that, on the screen, the play had a novel air of extreme fluidity. Oddly enough, because of the narrow range imposed by the color-TV control board, Director George Schaefer used only three cameras on the set and one on a platform, instead of the five cameras that handled the black-and-white telecast of Hamlet two years ago. However Schaefer achieved his remarkable mobility by keeping his camera moving into and out of the scene during each long sequence.

Schaefer concedes that the smoothness of the operation resulted from months of the kind of planning that is impossible on ordinary shows. Long before Macbeth went into rehearsal, he was spending five to seven hours a day over the blueprints of the set, blocking out each scene with miniature cameras and calling the shots that would be used on the air. He was also helped by the physical properties of the set itself. Where the Hamlet set had been built in a circle with the cameras stationed in the center and radiating outward, Macbeth was all of a piece, like a stage setting. It consisted (see cut) of the exterior walls and drawbridge of Dunsinane, two interior courtyards and two stairways leading to Macbeth's room and the guest room where King Duncan was murdered. Because Actor Maurice Evans and Schaefer conceived the play as "an extremely personal and domestic drama," all these elements were built in proper relation to each other, rather like the enlargement of a toy castle. Instead of the actors going to the camera, the camera followed the actors.

Except for the enforced shortage of cameras, color TV worked no production hardship. "We just went ahead as though color hadn't been invented," says Schaefer. One unfortunate result: after the murder of the King, the hands of Evans and Judith Anderson (Lady Macbeth) looked appropriately bloody on black-and-white; on color TV they seemed to be literally dripping with gore.

Maurice Evans, who has already played an excellent Hamlet and a sympathetic Richard II on NBC-TV shows, may have lacked the physical bulk and dominance that seem required for Macbeth. But as always, he spoke with clarity and feeling. So did Judith Anderson, who was superb in the sleepwalking scene. The rest of the cast did not always do so well: the three weird sisters, along with many of the supporting players, often seemed as drowned in gibberish as in mist. For next season, Evans and Schaefer are thinking of deserting Shakespeare for Shaw: Evans has already taken TV options on The Devil's Disciple and Man and Superman.

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