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to the yellow flicker of the ‘brief candle’ and autumn sere. Yet surprisingly our most lyrical actor caught the soldier and murderer too; this was a lithe and virile figure, combining the mud-stained practicability of the warrior with the golden eloquence of the poet: a haunted and haunting performance, with a twilit bitterness at the last. 27
    Gielgud’s Stratford-upon-Avon production in 1952 with the amiable Ralph Richardson in the title role was less successful. J. C. Trewinthought that as Lady Macbeth, “Margaret Leighton, at first a tigress burning bright, has the drive, the command that Macbeth lacks.” 28
    Expatriate Russian director Theodore Komisarjevsky’s 1933 production at Stratford revolutionized the play with an expressionist design against a background of war. Its experimental quality received mixed reviews, but despite initial reservations, many critics recognized its significance: “It was swift and exciting; intelligently directed to suggest presage of impending doom; and when once we had grasped the producer’s conventions and intentions all, or nearly all, fell into place naturally and inevitably. The old play was given a new cutting-edge.” 29
    Orson Welles’s 1936 production at the Lafayette Theatre in Harlem was equally cutting edge, set in Haiti with an all-black cast, including many nonprofessional actors. It became known as the “Voodoo”
Macbeth
and was noted mainly for its theatrical inventiveness and the violence of its imagery, which tended to overshadow individual performances.
    Michael Benthall’s successful production at the Old Vic with Paul Rogers and Ann Todd was first staged at the Edinburgh Festival in 1954 to great critical acclaim and afterward toured America, but the production that has come to be regarded as one of the two or three most successful of the twentieth century—along with Trevor Nunn’s Dench/McKellen version, discussed by the director below—was the 1955 production at Stratford with Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh. Glen Byam Shaw’s direction was in fact considered rather ordinary; it was Olivier who made the show, as the London
Times
’s critic records:
    The striking thing about the performance is its psychological penetrativeness. It cuts boldly through all sorts of superficial contradictions in the character. The usual difficulty of reconciling the tough warrior with the superstition-ridden neurotic seems scarcely to exist. Attention from first to last is fastened on the mind of Macbeth. Sir Laurence is concerned first to show that his mind is already filled with dangerous thoughts and desires which it dare not formulate till the Weird Sisters give them voice. By various subtleties and ingenuities, eachhaving the freshness of a new-minted coin, he suggests vividly that the latent nobility of character may yet assert itself against the fatal lure of ambition, but once this hope has gone and dreadful desires have turned to deed the actor treats the deed as a mere incident making possible the psychological drama which follows. 30
    Macbeth
’s cultural legacy is pervasive due to the relative simplicity of the plot and its archetypal nature, the rise and fall of an ambitious leader, as well as its powerful characterization, especially of Lady Macbeth. It has been frequently adapted into other media—opera, novels, film, television, science fiction, and song—and employed for a variety of purposes from political cartoons and satire to advertising. As Irena Makaryk suggests in her discussion of Ukrainian director Les Kurbas’s 1924 modernistic, anti-bourgeois production, “Within the general trend of modernizing Shakespeare in the West from the 1960s on,
Macbeth
has been the ‘trademark’ avant-garde play, its primitivism and anarchism being particularly attractive characteristics.” 31
    Verdi’s
Macbeth
was his first adaptation of a Shakespeare play and its brilliance was instantly recognized. First performed at the Teatro della Pergola,