From the moment you pushed open the heavy wooden door to New York City’s Park Avenue Armory, you entered a special world created for the Rob Ashford/Kenneth Branagh production of Macbeth, an exhilarating, two-hour version of one of Shakespeare’s most beloved plays. You were given a color-coded rubber bracelet with your clan name—mine was red, as I was in the Robertson clan—and your program cover was imprinted with the name and tartan of your clan. You were directed to your clan room where preshow excitement began to build as you met your fellow clan members and prepared for battle.
Each clan was then led to its seating area in the Armory’s vast Drill Room, totally transformed into ancient Scotland with a nod to Stonehenge. The audience crossed a dark and misty heath (Katie Fry and Valerie Light were the lead scenic artists for the heath), a concept that pulled everyone into the immersive nature of the event. The seating bleachers ran along both sides of a long and narrow central playing area, complete with pouring rain in the opening battle scene that turned the sandy floor to mud.
The setting at the Armory varied from the original iteration of the production in St. Peter’s Church, in Ancoats, Manchester, England, where it premiered as part of the 2013 Manchester International Festival. “The ends of the seating banks in New York were pretty much the end walls of the church,” explains associate lighting designer Rob Halliday, who worked on both versions.
“In Manchester, there were only five rows of seating because that was all we could fit in. In New York, the decision was made to keep the playing area much the same size because the show itself—performance, number of actors—wouldn’t really scale up,” Halliday notes, pointing out that’s why there was that big walk-in area of heath in New York. “Though this had another cunning function,” he says, “since it was constructed of an insulation material that helped to control sound reflections from the floor and so helped tame the difficult acoustics in the Armory.”
Scenic designer Christopher Oram added new treatments for both ends of the playing area in New York, including the Stonehenge construction. Richard Nutbourne and his assistant Sarah Crane did all of the scenic art on the set, from sculpting all of Stonehenge to painting the religious icons. “Richard is a bit of a genius,” notes Halliday, adding that the “fake Rothkos” in Red were also his work.
Neil Austin designed powerful lighting that helped convey the pagan times of the play, centuries before electricity would have illuminated the halls of such castles. “Neil and I worked quite hard to make sure that the angles of the main part of the rig—two lines of ETC Revolutions— matched the angle we had in Manchester, where they were rigged around columns in the church,” says Halliday. “This is quite precise because the lights had to be able to light the actors all the way across the playing area—even when they were leaning right against the opposite wall, as they had a tendency to do—without blinding the front row of the audience, all while getting under Christopher Shutt’s vocal reinforcement loudspeakers.” In Manchester, there were 10 Revolutions per side. In New York, there were 12, and Halliday notes that the designers “always felt a couple short in Manchester.”
From Manchester To New York
Another difference from Manchester to New York was that there were initially four Philips Vari-Lite VL1000AS units at each end of the church rigged on booms (two per side per end) doing shots along the playing area. These were rigged on overhead trusses in New York to provide a similar angle. “We added more VL1000AS units, so there were four sets of three, because the playing area was just ever so slightly longer,” indicates Halliday.
"In Manchester, we used bits of the architecture of the building which was obviously not replicated in New York,” adds Halliday. For example, Clay Paky Alpha Profile 1200s were placed on an adjacent building to shed light through a window at one end of the church, and another on a giant cherry picker added light through a window at the other end. “The ‘sun’ and ‘moon’ PAR arrays in New York were our alternative versions of this,” Halliday explains. “The ‘sun’ was a mixture of very narrow and medium PAR64 units. The ‘moon’ was all PAR64 ACL units; each array had 52 fixtures.”
In Manchester, the designers also used the tiny high windows along each side of the church. “We had a PAR64 ACL rigged outside each, letting us create finger-like shafts of light emanating from each window as if daylight,” says Halliday. “In New York, we added two trusses each containing five VL1000AS units intended to let us create a similar feel. In fact, we’ve ended up using them in quite different ways.
“The overhead rig is all moving lights; originally this was not because of any great desire to use moving lights specifically, but because there would be no easy way of getting to the rig to focus it once the earth was in position, so the moving lights removed the need for access,” Halliday explains. “In New York, we also added three [Philips Vari-Lite] VL3500Q Spot fixtures over the heath; these are used to let us light the heath and also to be able to give a narrow shot into the playing area for particular moments.” For example, these fixtures are used as specials on Banquo’s ghost at the long wooden table that cleverly splits in two as the ghost moves through the space.
The lower level section of the lighting rig—hidden in and around the set—is all conventionals, mainly ETC Source Four ellipsoidals that provided cross-light at each end of the playing area and in the central vom area. “These were pretty much as in Manchester, except we added a few more to let us uplight into each set of stones,” notes Halliday. “There were also some short L&E battens uplighting the religious icons. On the deck, three VL1000AS units on the floor at the walk-in end provided all of the light for the witches.” There was also one VL1000AS behind the set at the other end for the first “is this a dagger...” moment, in which Macbeth sees a vision of a dagger before him, encouraging his bloody deeds.
While Halliday finds that the Manchester version of this specific moment was perhaps more satisfying (read his article about the Manchester version), there is no doubt that Ashford and Branagh, who made his acclaimed New York stage debut with this production, and their team of designers have produced a version of Macbeth that is set in ancient times but resonated loud and clear with today’s audience. And Austin’s lighting, dramatic and filled with foreboding shadows, seemed to echo Macbeth’s fears: “Let not light see my black and deep desires.”
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