“Macbeth” is littered with casualties — and not only on the fictional battlefield. The tragedy has taken down a battalion of the finest directors and actors, who have fallen victim to the play’s real curse: its deceptive dramatic difficulty. The problem is counterintuitive. Why does a play as spellbindingly theatrical as “Macbeth” excite an audience's interest only to exhaust it by the end? Macbeth’s path as protagonist is a strange one. At the start of the play, he’s a war hero with conspicuous... Read this story
