Macbird! and Macbeth: Topicality and Imitation in Barbara Garson’s Satirical Pastiche

Summary

Once one has seen or read a play like Macbeth, it has perforce an afterlife in memory, in imaginative and emotional recollections of the experience of the performance or the reading. That sort of afterlife remains private and is as varied in content as readers are in nature and number. The sort of afterlife on which this paper focuses, however, is of a different sort, a public afterlife captured in literary, graphic or cinematic artefacts, or in any or all of the theatrical productions that have followed since the play’s first staging by the King’s Men. I have coined the term, ‘afterfact’– conflated from ‘artefacts of the afterlife’ – as a convenient label for this second sort of survival.

Macbeth afterfacts can be divided into two classes. The first consists of those productions on stage or film that purport to represent the original, ranging from reverent attempts to reproduce a simulacrum of the historical original, to the ‘30 Minute Macbeth’ chanted almost entirely by the witches staged at Oxford in the mid 1950s. The second group of afterfacts clearly has a relationship to the original, but does not claim to represent it in anything like its entirety. Films like Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood, or Men of Respect may be somewhere on a borderline between the two classes, but Gruach, Ubu Roi, Macbett, and Cahoot’s Macbeth, as well as Barbara Garson’s Macbird!, my topic, are clearly members of the second class.