When Simon Phillips tackled Richard III for Melbourne Theatre Company, in 2010, he was inspired by George Bush; when he took on Julius Caesar, in the ’90s, it was Thatcher’s Britain. So one shudders to think of what might inspire him to stage Shakespeare’s most brutal and bloody tragedy, Macbeth.
As it happens, his Macbeth has nothing to do with contemporary America and its preposterous President. “It’s ludicrous to say that America today is like Macbeth’s Scotland,” Phillips demurs. “[America] is fucked, but it isn’t that.”
Instead, Phillips turned his attention to the perpetual battlefield of the Middle East for inspiration. “I saw a fantastic photograph early on when I was conceiving this, of a whole force of army trucks and soldiers on the ground with guns – all red – and this woman, swathed in black, stopping and talking to them. It was such a potent image, somehow.” It led him to a conception of the ‘weird sisters’ as people “who are disenfranchised, un-homed. I wanted them to be against the established order, a force for chaos.”
A world of endless warfare, of a bloodlust that can never be sated, does brilliantly describe Macbeth’s Scotland, and when it came to casting the brutish Thane, Phillips wanted someone who could convincingly play a soldier. Enter Hollywood heartthrob Jai Courtney: “Have you met him? He’s massive. He’s over six foot, built like a brick shithouse,” the director enthuses. Even before we meet Macbeth we’re told he ‘unseamed [a foe] from the nave to the chops’, so it was important to Phillips that his actor would be physically intimidating.
This in turn required a Lady Macbeth who could match him. “I found it hard. I didn’t want her to be dwarfed by him. I wanted them to be a striking couple together, because you feel that there’s something about the way they work together that, if it weren’t being bent toward murder, is kind of magnificent.” Finally, Phillips settled on Sydney actor Geraldine Hakewill, who had the stature and the poise but also “a kind of fragility about her. You don’t get pure furnace.”
Phillips has directed Macbeth for MTC before – in an absolutely cracking production back in 1989 with the late great Frank Gallacher. “I know the play; I have entirely digested it in one context before,” he says. “But it’s always different with a new set of actors. And of course, you feel the weight of expectation, representing this magnificent piece of writing, and it feeds you a lot. The mental acuity required when addressing this language is amazing.”
Macbeth runs June 5 to July 15 at Southbank Theatre.
Check out what else is on stage in Melbourne in June.