Macbeth

Dark times unleash the most terrible demons of the human soul into the world. While the struggle for the ideals of humanism suffers daily defeat, the thin membrane of humanity in man is bursting at the seams, and the voracious beast of the invader's senseless war snaps its bloody jaws from the darkness at the flesh of European values, we turn to William Shakespeare's darkest text, "Macbeth."

To understand darkness - one must become darkness. And the theater is the right place for this. Therefore, right now, being at the outpost of European civilization, we are beginning to peer into the abyss of evil through the prism of the history of the dehumanization of the Scottish king - a usurper of power. Immersion in the mechanics of the emergence of tyranny and contemplation of the mechanisms of political games that generate tyrants leaves many questions about the value and security capacity of humanistic ideals — the basis of the value core of European civilization.

“Macbeth” — is the story of a great transformation from a noble knight to a tyrant — a usurper of power. Even the best people have no safeguards against the destructive influence of power unlimited by the letter of the law. The story of Macbeth's dehumanization begins with a victory, where the glorious noble commander, under the influence of suggestions from demonic forces, takes a step towards irreversibility.

What is the infernal in human life now? In what forms do demons and witches come to a person in a digital society? In our interpretation of the demonic in the life of modern man, we abandon the forms proposed by Shakespeare — The demons of modernity live in the digital, in the media, in hybrid warfare. The demonic world manifests itself in manipulation and pressure through the formation of public opinion on social networks, on television, etc.

Digital reality is global. There is nowhere to hide, it is impossible to avoid the aggressive bombardment of a person's private life with information messages. Digital society has found itself in a continuous symbolic space, continuous and comprehensive. Not everyone who gets here has safeguards against manipulation and the harmful effects of hybrid warfare attacks, can distinguish a real fact from a fake, form an impartial attitude towards certain events. Instead, there is plenty of manipulation here. That is why the bearded Shakespearean witches-prophetesses who predict Macbeth's accession to the throne are depersonalized in our country and acquire the features of all-seeing robotic entities. These entities, like the “Eye of Sauron”, are continuously present in the reality of the heroes and are endowed with unlimited power, influencing their actions and shaping their worldview.

Shakespeare's Macbeth was a man of his time, who stood at the crossroads of pagan and Christian values ​​— a personality with a strong will to assert himself at any cost, but one who already has a formed awareness of the inevitable retribution for the evil committed. It is this split in Macbeth's consciousness that leads him to madness.

The historical reality of today is also at the epicenter of a large-scale value rift that has arisen between the democratic world and the tyrannies that are raising their heads. How can we, as a society, survive and enter a new world after victory with reliable safeguards against information manipulation? How can a leader maintain power without becoming a tyrant? We ask ourselves these and many other questions in the theater and more broadly in the hope of becoming more capable and discerning as a society.

A hundred years ago, in 1924, the outstanding Ukrainian theater director-avant-garde Les Kurbas realized the first large-scale production of William Shakespeare's tragedy "Macbeth" at the "Berezil" theater. Today we continue this movement towards understanding the political person in the theater.

Translation by Boris Ten and Yuri Koretsky is used.