Quote of the Day (Juan Ramírez, on Shakespeare and the Theater’s Hardiest Superstition)

“Perhaps the industry’s best-known bylaw is that, unless acting in Shakespeare’s early 17th-century play, one should never say the word ‘Macbeth’ inside a theater — otherwise you risk ruining the current production. The origins of this are predictably murky. The play traffics in things that might very well incur a hex — witches, hauntings, grisly murders — but one possible source could be the simple fact that, in an era when most theater companies operated in repertory (performing a rotating selection of popular works), ‘the Scottish play,’ as the piece can be safely referred to, was a guaranteed moneymaker. If your season was failing, it might be time to stage ‘Macbeth.’”— New York-based Venezuelan-American writer and critic Juan Ramírez, “Don’t Say ‘Macbeth,” in T (The New York Times Style Magazine), Nov. 17, 2024

I noticed the above article, with its explanation for the bad luck associated with saying the word “Macbeth,” on the same weekend that one of my local PBS stations was re-running a charming indie production from a few years ago, called—yes, The Scottish Play.

But even before writer-director Keith Boynton had alluded to this curse in comic cinematic fashion, someone else had beaten him to it in the early oughts: the creators of the fun Canadian TV series Slings and Arrows, set in a fictional Shakespearean festival like the real-world Stratford Festival.

One episode from its second season, “Rarer Monsters,” sends up the whole jinx with tongue in cheek, much like the rest of this series.

Some readers of this post—those who have a real sense of theatrical history—are likely to protest: “But, Mike, the curse is real!” 

They’ll point to a legendary British production of the play starring Sir John Gielgud, when three actors died during the show’s run and a costume designer killed himself right after the premiere.

And what about poor Charlton Heston, who, in a 1953 production, had severe burns to his legs—the result of his tights being soaked in kerosene?

“Fie!” as The Bard would say (and as I do now). Did that stop Gielgud from directing a 1952 production of the play with the Royal Shakespeare Company? And did the curse stop Heston from coming back to the play for the fifth time in a 1975 staging with Vanessa Redgrave?

Well, I will give the skeptics this: Those witches at the start of the show, if costumed and lit correctly (maybe like the image accompanying this post), are definitely enough to give one…the Willies.