Manipuri Macbeth casts spell on London

Men in tribal gear, shoulder-length hair and carrying spears and flaming torches, stood ramrod straight on boats that slid through the Thames river in London. They were chanting magic spells and sometimes broke into displays of tribal martial arts. Astonished passersby may have been relieved to know that these men were performing Shakespeare.

The group, part of an experimental theatre company from Manipur, have brought to London an unusual and spectacular production of Macbeth.

Macbeth, more than any other Shakespeare play, has been known for its many interpretations, since it lends itself easily to adaptations rooted in other cultures and languages. Critics put it down to the theme of the play, which highlights the darker nature of man, with liberal doses of magic and superstition.

Macbeth -- Stage of Blood, the production by the Laboratory Theatre of Manipur, is like no other Macbeth seen before in Britain. In recent years, there has been a particularly well-received Romanian King Lear and a South African Zulu Macbeth, staged recently at the Globe Theatre in London, came close.

For sheer novelty of staging and theatre techniques, Stage of Blood is unique. For the main stage, there is a large barge on the Thames, secured to the banks. But the play makes use of the river waters all around the raft as an eerie backdrop.

The play starts at sundown, during high tide, and ends well into the night, at low tide. It employs indigenous tribal rituals, like falling into a trance, as a theatre technique. It draws on an important aspect of Manipuri life -- the worship of nature.

The dozen male actors play all the roles -- soldiers, wives, Macbeth's associates and the witches (seven of them, in place of Shakespeare's three) and a single actor playing both Macbeth and Lady Macbeth in a dazzling and disquieting portrayal of evil.

Audiences entering and leaving the site encounter tribal rituals performed by British actors and actresses who have joined the troupe in London, employing recently-learned chanting techniques to induce themselves into a trance. At the end of the play, the more experienced Manipuri actors can sometimes be seen helping their British counterparts out of their trance.

''Sometimes actors can be very unfascinating,'' says producer and associate director Ajay Kumar. ''In a trance they are often able to suggest so much more. They bring their unconscious to the performance and that can be a very powerful element.''

There is another reason for introducing the spectacular and dark rituals into the play: Manipuris are organised into the supernatural or spiritual world through a medium, known as the Maibi. Like the witches of Macbeth, the Maibis, usually women, are also known to have the power of prophecy.

In the course of the play, boats flit by silently, carrying torch- and spear-wielding tribals. Fires are lit on the floating stage, producing a reflection of the drama in the waters around and providing a magical vehicle for soliloquies.

When night falls and the tide is low, actors slowly walk over to the floating stage from a nearby river island, playing havoc with the imagination of the audience, to which it appears as if the actors are walking on water.

Stage of Blood has a powerful and weirdly unsettling effect on its audiences. 'It looks as if the limits of Western rationalism have been reached here,' one British commentator wrote.

Another critic wrote, 'Rarely has theatre made such spectacular use of landscape. It might not be the Macbeth we know and love, but as a resonant, hallucinated experience, there has been nothing like it.'

There is also a political angle to this production.

''The symbology of Macbeth powerfully expresses the tragedy of Manipur and the crisis of identity in the Manipur psyche -- at once gentle, dynamic and receptive but with a deeper inner turmoil which finds extreme expression in the conflicts of today,'' says Lokendra Arambam, the play's director.

According to Ajay Kumar, the Manipuri version is ''a real-timeMacbeth, because I imagine that that world may also have been a very mysterious, superstitious world where one did have people who had apparitions, people who were very intuitive, had these qualities of parapsychology which has been taken out of the Western timescape.''