About Macbeth: Entrevista a Declan Donellan

Declan Donnellan: I am very lucky to work with such wonderful actors and we spend a long time working together on a scene and trying it in many different ways. No, I absolutely do not start with a fantasy of how a scene might come across. We explore many different aspects of how these people connect with each other and how these people connect with the space in which they find themselves. And then we set up the scenes but the scenes, I can assure you, are slightly different every night. That is the only way that we can ensure that they are alive. I think it is very important in art to make priorities, and very often we fail not because we make priorities but because we have been too cowardly to de-prioritise. For me the most important priority is that the work that we do is alive and not dead. I let that be my guiding light and I fall back on the simplicity of that goal. So the litmus test is not “is it right or wrong?”. The litmus test is not “do I like this or not?”. The litmus test is always, and must always be, “is it alive or not?”.