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Macbeth Reconstructed

Witches gather, confronting a crowd, and cast a spell on them with a dreadful Bakhtiari lament. Forced to sing with The Strange Women, they all chant that they will meet Macbeth and Banquo at “the set of sun.” Along with this, a nonsensical struggle over a red cloak occurs between a man and a woman. The witches disappear, and the enigmatic non-Shakespearian prologue ends.
The crowd competes in an absurd way to sit on a chair. The winner becomes King Duncan. Here, two different paths unfold: On the one hand, the entire crowd is identified with one killing machine. There is no distinction between who kills, who watches the kill, and who commands the kill. Therefore, except for the witches, there remains just this one role, the killer, with various names, whether it be Duncan, Banquo, Lady Macbeth, etc. On the other hand, matters of battle are discussed in a vital yet ridiculous manner. There is a King Duncan; he rules, but something is wrong – the witches have sown a power in the people to mock the king, to profane the holy, and they shall reap it little by little.
Soon, we see this is an act of emancipation directed by witches, taking these two pathways simultaneously: Along with the extension of ominous aspects of Shakespeare’s Macbeth (in which the killing theme is essential for us), there grows, gradually, a carnivalesque characteristic. The agents in both orientations are the people. They feed this invisible killing machine as long as they are unable to stop it. Nevertheless, the witches try to teach them how to live as if it were all a festival and not a tragedy. When they succeed in forming a potential body for holding an odd ritual they have in mind, the climax is acquired:
The people perform the Mir-e Nowruz [please see the appendixes on this Persian festival], and Macbeth becomes the Mir: the king of Scotland. Now, Macbeth is not like the other kings. He is a false ruler, and the people know it. They keep up with the Mir-e Nowruz ritual until it arrives at its end: Macbeth, too, finds out he is not a real king. With this self-consciousness, the role of the king, the killer, vanishes, and the witches fulfill their plan to destroy the patriarchal machine.
The dramaturgy plot of Macbeth Reconstructed, roughly sketched above, is based on the historical transformation of Iranian consciousness. In our work, the role of witches is a complete reversal of theirs in Shakespeare’s text. It reflects the necessity of listening to the repressed voice of feminine care. In the end, no Macbeth is killed; he just disappears into thin air. The Weird Sisters only teach, in our dramaturgy, the people how to dance and create a carnival. It is a genuine, historical, nonviolent resistance.

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