An Irishman's Diary

ONE OF the routine reporting jobs in any city newspaper is to ring the police and the fire brigade, periodically, and ask if anything bad has happened since the last time you called, an hour ago.

It must have been because of my early training in this technique that, during a quiet moment of the weekend just past, I phoned the Abbey Theatre, where another new production of Macbethopens tonight. My question was whether the infamous "curse" – the one the supposedly haunts all stagings of the play – had struck yet.

Not that, as a (mostly) rational person, I really believe in curses. If Macbethis more accident prone than most plays, I'm sure there are perfectly logical explanations.

It is said, for example, that being the shortest of Shakespeare's great plays, and a perennial favourite with audiences, Macbethis prone to being revived at short notice, especially if the play before it has bombed and the theatre is stuck for cash.

In such circumstances, forced economies are more likely, and thus the curse has a head start. Add in the fact that much of the play happens in the dark, or on a “blasted heath”. Then add the ubiquitous swords (not to mention free-floating daggers). And in short, you have a recipe for trouble.

There’s also the self-fulfilling aspect of the tradition. In Hamlet, if the set collapses fatally on the lead actor, even as he utters the line “To be not not to be?”, well, that’s just an unfortunate accident. But if Lady Macbeth breaks a fingernail while trying to wash King Duncan’s blood off her hands, that must be the curse.

So, anyway, when I explained the nature of my inquiry, the Abbey put me on to Jimmy Fay, director of the new production. Who told me that, no – touch wood – nothing untoward had happened yet. Unless, that is, you counted an unfortunate incident last autumn, a few weeks after he started preliminary work on the play.

Then, one day, he found himself asking the dreaded question: "Is this an Arts Council funding cut I see before me?" And sure enough, it was. Apart from which, he says, no ill-luck has befallen the production. But, directing it for the first time, he can see how Macbethacquired its supernatural reputation: "It's quite a creepy play." I spoke briefly too to veteran actor John Kavanagh who, surprisingly, is making his Macbethdebut (as Duncan). His understanding of the superstition surrounding the play – especially the rule about not mentioning its name in the theatre – is that it only applies to other productions in which an actor is involved.

This must be linked with the idea of Macbethas an emergency fall-back following a commercial disaster. By merely mentioning the "M" word during work on another play, you invoke the prospect of failure, thus making it more likely. There's a certain logic in that too.

I thought better of mentioning it to John, but one of the oldest, and most frequently cited, examples of the curse concerns a 1672 production in Amsterdam: wherein the actor playing Macbethis said to have substituted a real dagger for the fake one and actually killed the man playing Duncan, live on stage.

This was doubly unfortunate since, in Shakespeare’s text, the murder happens off-stage. So there is no call for a knife of any kind. But perhaps it was an early example of method acting, taken to extremes.

ANOTHER INCIDENT often mentioned as evidence of Macbeth-related misfortune is that Abraham Lincoln read parts of the play to friends only days before he died. In fact, they later recalled that he recited it "for several hours" while travelling by steamboat back to Washington, and that he particularly dwelt on the passage: "Duncan is in his grave; After life's fitful fever he sleeps well . . ." If he recited the play for "several hours", he must have dwelt on a few more lines than that. The entire piece comes it at about 120 minutes – a sprint by Shakespearian standards – which is one of the reasons theatres like staging it.

Indeed, never mind his reading the play, it should diminish the curse's credibility that, even though Lincoln was in a theatre the night he died, it was not to see Macbeth. As it was, his recitation a week earlier was probably, like all the other ominous incidents, a factor of the law of averages. Macbethwas his favourite play, by all accounts. He must have read it often.

Even so, as a portent of doom, Lincoln's obsession with the play gains some circumstantial weight from a word which is apparently used for the first time in English in Macbeth. According to Brewers Dictionary, the word derives from an old Arabic nickname, given to a sect of "Moslem fanatics" in Persia circa AD 1100, who in turn earned it from their habit of smoking hashish prior to carrying out murders.

The English version of the word is “assassin”. And via his lead protagonist, Shakespeare introduces it to literature when wondering aloud what unforeseen events might follow Duncan’s killing. “If th’assassination could trammel up the consequence,” Macbeth fantasises fruitlessly, before in any case proceeding with the foul deed, the untrammeled consequences of which would still be filling theatres 400 years later.

• fmcnally@irishtimes.com