Saw Macbeth on Boston Common. There were about a dozen of us who met to watch the play. Overall it was an enjoyable experience, though it started getting coldly damp as the evening drew on, and I felt quite chilled by the end of the final act.

Such experiences invite comparison to similar experiences, and I was reminded of other Shakespeare's I've seen recently. Although Shakespeare on the Common was much more professional than the Shakespeare in the Park at Prince's Island, I actually enjoyed my experiences at the latter more. The size of the population here, and the fact that there is obviously much more money poured into the production here than in Calgary meant that the crowd was huge! We arrived in good time, but even then, we were quite far from the stage and missed many of the nuances of the play. I was much closer to the stage the last time I was at Prince's Island, and even though the acting was a bit more amateur (though one of the actor's in the last play I saw also worked for us at ATP), the performance was enjoyable because it was so intimate. When we were groundlings at the Globe (newly rebuilt and only reopened the year before we were there) watching King Lear, I also enjoyed it more because we were experiencing the play much the same way as it would have been enjoyed during its original producation. [Yes, I know there are many differences ranging from the lighting to the attitude of the crowd, but overall, it was faithful in its minimalization of sets, props and costuming]

The setting for this production was war-time, so Macbeth was in uniform as were the rest of the Scotsmen, and Lady Macbeth wore either short or long full skirts; the witches were characterized by long black shawls - to look like gypsies perhaps? The gunshot echoes (yes, some of the sword scenes were updated, though there was still plenty of sword play) made interesting echoes off the surrounding skyscrapers. Made me wonder if they could be confused for the real thing. And the strange man who wandered by sounding like the back-up sound of a large truck adding a sense of the surreal to the play - appropos, I think.

I have come to the conclusion that I like my Shakespeare either utterly groundbreaking (whether it works or not) like the Pericles we saw a few months ago, or intimate like the Mount Royal players in Prince's Island or the Globe in London (as a groundling, having to stand the whole time with actor's making their entrances from among the crowd).