On the 24th March I went to see the National Theatre’s production of Macbeth at the Wales Millennium Centre in Cardiff.
The theatre is amazing. On the outside it has in humongous lettering ’in these stones, horizons sing’ and it was written in Welsh too. I’m not sure what it means but made me think that anything is possible. Inside it was modern and very grand with I think 5 tiers. There were so many people there, that they ran out of programmes!
What a great evening! The play started, as expected, with the 3 witches – their voices were a bit strange because they were quite echoey and hard to understand. However, they started it all off with a spooky and eerie smoky opening. The set was dark and quite plain. The buildings looked military like – not much furniture or colour.
The actors were very good and put on good Scottish accents. I liked that they used special lighting to show the ghosts of all the people Macbeth killed – highlighting them in green which made me think of poison. One of my favourite parts was at the end when Macduff cut the head off Macbeth. We could see him sawing it off and I think the actor had his head in a hole on the set so it looked like he was headless!!!
I remember when we read the play, Macbeth started off as being a hero but then became ambitious and greedy for having power. He then felt really bad about the killings but then seemed to get used to the idea of being bad and thought he had gone too far to care about being good anymore. In this production however, Macbeth seemed to be troubled the whole time once he started killing. He didn’t appear to enjoy any power and was anxious and tense all of the time.
I enjoyed the play a lot. I especially liked recognising some of the famous lines we learned in class “is that a dagger ….” and “tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow …”
by Harry S (Year 6)
