37 you cannot call them back - they are out there - so in placing them there, you have to commit to what you have said, thought, and felt. No retreat is possible” (Roden- burg 2023:54). This principle resonated especially in Lady Macbeth’s speech in Act 1, Scene 5, where she commands the supernatural, every word spoken as an incantation. We embodied this in practice through the other actor’s discordant humming after the line “Come, you spirit”, as if in response to her invocation, while my descent to the floor allowed them to manipulate my body, symbolising the external forces Lady Macbeth has invoked. Although these two exercises both evoked visceral reactions from me, I had always been able to separate myself on stage from whatever crisis in confidence I was having off stage. For me, confidence comes from knowledge, so I threw myself headfirst into the joy of reading. This led me to recall Patsy Rosenburg: “Unless we listen to Shakespeare, we won’t hear the richness of the language or follow complex thoughts and debates” (Rodenburg 2023:10). In my studies, I was particularly drawn to the character of Lady Macbeth. She seemed a wholly unique figure and the overly ambitious woman I had been warned never to become. Despite her tragic ending, her mere existence to me was revolutionary, even as my understanding of her was limited by a restrictive academic culture that left little room for critical exploration. Lady Macbeth’s entrance particularly struck me; ‘alone’ has particular significance. As she is not spoken of before this, she is given the freedom to establish herself and take possession of the space; there is no assumption that she will wield power like the male characters, so it becomes a moment of strength and transgression. In taking on the role of Lady Macbeth, I was also challenged by residual conflicts about inhabiting a role so strongly associated with dark forces, defiance, and the claim to power. This resonates with Sylvia Federici’s 2004 book, Caliban and the Witch, which conceptualises women’s bodies as sites of control and how they are bound to the lurid figure of the witch as a means to “bring women to heel” (Thorn, 2018) to patriarchal discipline, a framework that became instrumental to my approach to Lady Macbeth. Situating her ambition, dominance, and engagement with the supernatural within this critical framework encouraged me to view these aspects not as moral weaknesses but as desires strong enough to transcend patriarchal constraints. This enabled me to engage with Lady Macbeth with an awareness of the historical context and anxieties her character represents and to let this tension inform my physicality, vocal authority, and character mentality. Once again, I gained valuable insights from the module exercises. While doing Wangh’s ‘I can’t play you’ exercise (Wangh 2000: 230-232), we were asked to visualise our character and express why we could not play them. I started by repeating aloud, ‘I can’t play you because you’re so certain.’ Then I moved to where my character would stand to imagine how it might feel to hear these words said to you. The phrase that popped up in my head as I acknowledged where I, as
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