"Sleep No More" can be read before the start, in red capitals. With slight oscillations in height, supported by barely visible individuals, they gravitate over a dimly lit stage. Easily understandable, the formula nevertheless portends the opposite disposition, as such sinister: the impossibility of seeing clearly, of discerning after an already impossible rest, once King Duncan's murder prevents Macbeth from sleeping. Much blood will be shed in the irrational race to consolidate a power that, according to the law of inverse effort ---or a kind of karmic curse---, seems to move further and further away.
Disturbing like few others, Shakespeare's drama has known countless theatrical versions and also film adaptations of great intensity, such as those by Orson Welles or Akira Kurosawa, or more recently Justin Kurzel or Joel Coen. In contrast, Giuseppe Verdi's operatic version, premiered in 1847 ---and therefore chronologically prior to the works that would grant him immortality: Rigoletto, Il trovatore and La traviata--- not only delves into the most gloomy and tremendous aspect, evoked in the orchestral Prelude, but also summons diverse registers, including lively or majestic rhythms that can eventually disorient the listener, if not amplify the disconcerting background of the story. Verdi, who also intervened in the creation of Francesco Maria Piave's libretto, said at different times that it was his most beloved opera, largely due to the appreciation he professed for Shakespeare. As a testament to this, at the end of his life he would adapt Otello and create his Falstaff from The Merry Wives of Windsor.
The magnetism of Macbeth is, in any case, hardly comparable. The artist Jaume Plensa, responsible for the staging at the Liceu, has confessed that for years it has served as "a base and inspiration" for his sculptural work, perhaps familiar to the Barcelona public following his last major exhibition at the Macba. And it is that, dialectically opposed, fundamental questions in his production are re-encountered in Verdi's opera: the occupation of space and the inner gaze, transparency and opacity, emptiness and the desire for control, in the context of a crisis of language, which reverberates in the throng of characters ---letters or filigrees--- potentially significant. In the first scene, in fact, a human bust created by a disordered alphabet appears as a fortress, falsely impregnable, from which Macbeth, along with Banquo, will receive the ominous prophecy from the three witches. Verdi uses three choirs that give voice to each of them, possibly one of the great successes of his adaptation. As a transpersonal and esoteric truth, emanating from the electrified movements of their bodies, a necessarily misunderstood message resonates.
"Aesthetics is also content; what you see is also giving you an attitude towards things" (Jaume Plensa)Dance will possess in Plensa's version a capital importance, for physically manifesting the invisible energy that Verdi also conveys through music. Unhinging waves for those who recognize themselves from them, with the fatal seduction of an equivocal promise of power. The destiny that awaits Macbeth is chaotically inscribed on the robe that invests him. Ignorant of this, unable to conceal the strangeness he experiences, he asks himself in anguish: But why do I feel my hair stand on end? / Thought of blood, whence were you born? ("But why does my hair stand on end? / Criminal thought, where were you born?"). If criminal disposition arises with the occasion, as a popular Italian saying goes, it seems that condemnation is inevitable, inscribed in the unconsciousness of one who craves power as a final solution. Banquo's warning is useless, a secondary but fundamental character in Verdi's version, when he reflects "to himself": But often the impious Spirit of Avernus / Speak, and deceive us, truthful sayings, / And then he abandons us, accursed ones / On that abyss that it dug for us ("But often the cruel spirits of the mist / tell truths to deceive us, / and abandon us afterwards, cursed, / over the abyss they themselves opened").
Jaume Plensa's humanistic vindication is manifested even in a work as sinister as Macbeth, in terms of the search for a universal language, free of prefigured meanings and more aware of the empirical conditions that Kant, already in the Enlightenment era, would call "obstacles of human nature." The Barcelona artist, simultaneously, has participated decisively in the visibility of the operatic temple. The filigrees of the doors made by him give shape to "an icon, which once again shows the building to the people who pass by," as if to suggest the opening of the arts, and to make their transformative power evident. "Aesthetics is also content; what you see is also giving you an attitude towards things," Jaume Plensa explained in conversation with Víctor García de Gomar, who speaks of the fascination involved in moving from dream to reality, from the outline of ideas and details related to costumes, lighting, and stage arrangement, with the inclusion of some of his most celebrated works, as an indispensable part of the plot. The realization of fantasy suggests the indissoluble continuity of fiction and reality, which in the drama of Macbeth is shown from its darkest side, as the impossibility of sleeping again.
The protagonist's sleeplessness disturbs him and leads him to perceive the invisible, related to his inability to see clearly anymore. A ghostly projection of the bloody drift he cannot avoid perpetuating, as a paradoxical remedy that prevents him from embracing rest. The will to power subjugates him, in a dialectic that will affect the modern form of subjectivity ---the dominator being dominated by his desires for control and transcendence--- which Shakespeare prophesies, and which Hobbes, a few decades later, will lead him to propose the need for superhuman vigilance in the artificial and monstrous creation of the Leviathan. "An aggressor fears nothing but the singular power of another man," he explains in his dark diagnosis of 1651, reinterpreting the condition that equates all human beings from the reciprocal possibility of violently alienating what is one's own: "Given this situation of mutual distrust, no procedure is as reasonable for a man to protect himself as anticipation." Quotes that seem to illustrate Macbeth's (self-)destructive spiral, who projects his gaze - his way of interpreting the world - onto every being around him, and is barely moved upon learning of his accomplice's death.
Although its tone is by no means fatalistic, Jaume Plensa has captured the inherent reclusion of that reciprocity, doubtfully fraternal, through the introspection of beings with the potential for fruition; his well-known tree-figures, closed in an dreamlike embrace that ---in the Liceu's staging--- will transform into dance. Similar to what happens in the long and very enjoyable coven scene ---more colorful than horrifying--- the expansion opens up the possibility of a realization that deviates from the foreseen path, and offers other types of vision. This is the case of the three faces turned inward, eyes closed ---monumental like the Carmela that guards the Palau de la Música Catalana---, which silently invade the stage of the Gran Teatre del Liceu, in the space enabled by those unsuspected contortions. Transparency and opacity interact, interweaving a narrative more symbolic and allusive than properly linguistic, in a staging that ---Plensa says--- does not want to be "rough and tumble but aims to accompany the spectator."
"I am a foreigner in your midst, and I think that also gives it a certain freshness," (Jaume Plensa)
The predominance of the visual, a certain aestheticism incompatible with the Shakespearean original, softens the darker side of the narrative ---and that despite the marvelous performances of Sondra Radvanovsky's Lady Macbeth and Luca Salsi's convincing Macbeth--- energized by Verdi's jingoistic emphasis, which celebrates the final victory over personal authoritarianisms. The staging of the opera itself is, in fact, the result of a conjunction of efforts. A choral work highlighted by Plensa for its "magnetic component". The artist, who has repeatedly participated in La Fura's productions, mentions the notion of "total work of art" to recall the necessary involvement of contrasted profiles, with various concerns and interests. Humanity gathered in the recreation of a world with its passions and its small miracles, through thrilling music that brings the listener closer to the mystery of life and that, in the best of cases, re-sensitizes them to those aspects of existence that cynical pragmatism ---a silently dominant discourse--- would seem to have eradicated. "I am a foreigner in your midst, and I think that also gives it a certain freshness," Plensa suggested.
Even if Macbeth can be understood as one of those underground men condemned to insomnia, kept awake by the intuition of an absurd truth ---or by the erroneous interpretation of visions--- that prevents them from trusting anyone who does not feed their destiny, a thaumaturgical possibility is negatively outlined at the same time. Never taken for granted, but not drowned either; like the most genuine capacity of sculptures to vibrate quietly, in a self-conscious and impregnable occlusion, which lightens the sorrow.