Critique for Macbeth play

Attending the performance of Macbeth at the Toronto Centre of the Arts was a great experience that helped my interpretation and understanding of the play. Some of the things that I thought were positive about the performance were the modernizing of the play using modern warfare and the killing of Duncan on stage. Using modern warfare instead of having the play based 400 years ago was a great idea by the director because it made the play more entertaining and it allowed the audience to easily understand what was going on in the play. Additionally I thought that the killing of Duncan on stage was also a great idea. As one of the most important scenes in the play, it showed the audience that Macbeth went through with the murder. This allowed the performance to flow more smoothly in making it very clear to the audience what was happening. Despite these positives, I found that the performance had a lot of negatives that I would have changed. Firstly, I did not like how the performers on stage were not hooked up to microphones. By doing this, I found that it was very hard to hear them speak because the performers could not project their voices loud enough to clearly understand what they were saying. Secondly, I felt that the “unsex me” speech by Lady Macbeth was not executed as well as it should have been. The speech in the book is arguably one of the most powerful parts in the whole play and needs to be said with a lot of emotion. Having said that, I feel that Lauren Dobbie, who was the actress that played Lady Macbeth had a very weak “unsex me” speech and it could have been done a lot better. Thirdly, I felt that by having the three witches in the background of almost every scene of the play, was a very bold move by the director because it is not like that in the actual book. There are only certain scenes in the book where the witches are present but in the actual scene, they are present in almost every scene and I find this to be very ineffective.