Is this a dagger dangling before me? Staging the strange world of Macbeth (2024)

Macbeth is full of things that must be seen to be believed. Consider the witches who “look not like th’inhabitants o’th’earth” and conjure magical, masque-like apparitions from bubbling cauldrons. There are other visions, too: the dead Banquo’s gory reappearance at dinner, glimpsed only by the man who commissioned his murder, and Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalk, when she is tormented by blood stains only she can see. The Elizabethan astrologer and healer Simon Forman, who caught Macbeth at the Globe a few years after it was written and reflected on it in his diary, was struck by “3 women feiries or Nimphes” and the moment when Macbeth stood “to drink a Carouse … [and] the ghost of Banco came and sate down in his cheier behind him”.

Few visual moments are as strange as the scene at the beginning of act two, in which Macbeth sees a dagger floating in the air, apparently leading him to Duncan’s bedchamber. This hallucination provokes one of Shakespeare’s most famous speeches: “Is this a dagger which I see before me?”

The scene is pivotal. It marks the moment where the conscience-stricken Macbeth has finally decided to murder his king. It also connects with perhaps the play’s biggest theme, the irresistible march of fate, in which the hero initiates all manner of horrors almost without intending to.

But the weapon is puzzling, not only to Macbeth. Is it, as he says bemusedly, “a dagger of the mind, a false creation” or are we meant to think it is physically present, pointing the way to a murder that will be all too real? Is it, as critics have argued, a symbol of Macbeth’s faltering conscience or a demonic vision? Even more confusing is that there are technically two daggers in the scene – the imaginary one and the hero’s real one, which he pulls out on the lines “in form as palpable / As this which I now draw”, trying to test the apparition against reality. For this strangest of plays, the paradox is fitting: its best-known prop is almost certainly invisible.

No fewer than three new British productions of the play open in the next few weeks – Adele Thomas’s staging at Bristol Tobacco Factory, Rufus Norris’s at the National Theatre, with Rory Kinnear in the lead; and the RSC’s version starring Christopher Eccleston. There’s also a dance-theatre adaptation by Mark Bruce at Wilton’s Music Hall in east London. The dagger scene is one of the Scottish play’s trickiest challenges. How will they all tackle it?

In his diaries, Forman doesn’t offer much guidance – he fails to mention the scene. This might be a clue to how it was done during Shakespeare’s lifetime – with a powerful dose of imagination. Technical resources at the Globe were limited and scenery all but non-existent – beds or the odd chair might have been pulled on stage when appropriate, as well as small props such as candlesticks to denote night, because open-air performances generally took place in the afternoon. For the dagger scene, the likelihood is that Richard Burbage, Shakespeare’s first Macbeth, simply gazed into the middle distance and clawed at fresh air.

After Oliver Cromwell’s ban on theatre was ended by the restoration of Charles II in 1660, many Shakespeare works were brought back into the repertoire. Macbeth was among them – but suffered the indignity of being turned into a musical, “alter’d” by the playwright William Davenant with music by Matthew Locke, plus what were advertised as flying witches (most likely accomplished with hi-tech stage machinery). There are few clear records of how the dagger scene was done, but in some productions a real weapon was apparently dangled on stage on a string, whisked out of sight as Macbeth lunged.

The actor-manager David Garrick made a point of offering the play “as written by Shakespeare” when he began to perform Macbeth from 1744 onwards. A volatile stage presence, Garrick specialised in startling changes of emotion, and his dagger scene seems to have been a particular tour de force. The novelist Tobias Smollett described how the actor looked down, lost in brooding thought, before abruptly glancing up at “a dagger which he pretends to see above his head, as if the pavement was a looking glass that represented it by reflection”. One newspaper grumbled that it all took a “tedious length of time”, but the consensus was that Garrick did infinitely better than his hammy predecessor James Quin, who looked like he was trying to catch a fly rather than a murder weapon.

Later Macbeths showed off some barnstorming acting. In the Victorian era, actor-manager Samuel Phelps strained every sinew “until the brainsick, bewildered imagination made [the invisible dagger] real”.The statuesque American star Edwin Forrest apparently rubbed his eyes in disbelief at the vision before him, before shrieking “in a frenzy of horror” when he described how “gouts of blood” were starting to stain the handle as well as the blade. The redoubtable Henry Irving’s Macbeth, upon realising the dagger wasn’t real, “stared and stared until his eyes seemed to be starting from his head, his face hardened, as if terror were turning him to stone”.

Actors continue to find fresh possibilities in this most hackneyed piece of stage business. According to Kenneth Tynan, Laurence Olivier – who played Macbeth opposite his then wife, Vivien Leigh, in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1955 – offered a world-weary soldier’s response: “Far from recoiling … he greeted the air-drawn dagger with sad familiarity as a fixture in the crooked furniture of his brain.” At the same venue in 1967, Paul Scofield simply glanced towards two intersecting white lights, which made a cross- or dagger-like shape on stage. In the words of director Peter Hall, the moment portrayed “the tension between the imagining and the summoning up determination to do the murder”. Others have used sudden lighting changes or ominous music to hint that something unearthly is afoot, even if the dagger itself remains invisible.

Most stage directors have been wary of distracting from the text – or their leading actors’ attempts to portray Macbeth’s distracted wits – but film-makers have been more imaginative. Roman Polanski’s 1971 film, starring Jon Finch, offered a hovering special-effects dagger that gleams green like something out of Game of Thrones. Michael Fassbender’s attempt in 2015, directed by Justin Kurzel, featured a scene in which the hero was handed a bloody knife by a mysterious teenage boy, possibly the ghost of his dead child. Performing the speech for the Guardian’s Shakespeare Solos series, Daniel Mays reached for fresh air before pulling out a kitchen knife.

Some of the role’s finest interpreters have let Shakespeare’s words cast their own spell. A 1978 TV recording of Ian McKellen’s fevered, wild-eyed Thane, based on his RSC interpretation for Trevor Nunn two years earlier, offers a masterclass in suspenseful horror, the hero hoarsely whispering “I have thee not, and yet I see thee still” as if incanting a charm. Essaying the scene in 2007 (filmed two years later, again for TV), Patrick Stewart takes a different approach, yet it is every bit as chilling. “Come, let me clutch thee”, he coos, caressing an invisible dagger, before sighing “thou marshall’st me the way that I was going” with a shiver of surprised delight. It is as if this Macbeth is being led not on to murder, but something infinitely more seductive.