[In the following review of director Henryk Baranowski's Croatian-language production of Macbeth in 1997, Baker highlights the provocative setting and its eerie, preternatural mood.]

Theater 2000 is one of Croatia's first independent theatre companies, launched in a spirit of rebellion by leading actors yearning to break from the country's officially sanctioned theatre. Founder Vili Matula chose to debut his company with Macbeth, a suitably provocative choice—the play is, after all, the story of a bloodthirsty warlord, and local parallels would not be lost on a single audience member. Matula and Branka Trlin, the portrayers of the Macbeths, sold their Zagreb apartment to finance half the production, and the Istrian coastal resort of Pula, a town which shares Theatre 2000's occidental spirit, donated the use of a sprawling nineteenth-century fortress as the outdoor location for the play.

Theater 2000's choice of director was the Polish Henryk Baranowski. The director dressed his actors in Balkan combat fatigues and peppered the action with instances of physical and psychological brutality which are only faintly suggested in Shakespeare's text. Yet this Macbeth was not just about the Balkans—the dreamy, nonnaturalistic style of the production probed the psyches of Shakespeare's characters with astonishing precision and depth, making them both individualized and immediately recognizable.

A powerful tone of subconscious mayhem was set from the very start, and continued as the audience was led to the sound of kettle drums from courtyard to rampart, from tree-lined nook to moat. The lights came up on Duncan (the excellent Sreten Mokrovic) dressed in a white naval commander's uniform and puffing on a pipe as an electric guitar screamed Hendrix-like feedback over the speakers. Malcolm (Jasmin Novljakovic), machine gun strapped to his shoulder, performed a weird somnambulistic march as if he were a wind-up toy constantly playing out the end of its motion. Three vamps dressed in gaudy disco clothes and donning cheap wigs cavorted on the iron gate behind as MacDuff (Vojislav Stojkovic-Stole) Iurched his way towards this scary bunch along the ramparts above, his head thrown back, his feet shuffling. Until the very end of the play, it seemed that MacDuff's every move was constrained by invisible ropes of evil. Malcolm interrupted his sinister pacing to mock-strangle Duncan from behind as the doomed king continued to puff nonchalantly away. MacDuff finally collapsed center stage and began to deliver his report from the front; the suddenly alert Malcolm leapt forth and held a revolver to the exhausted thane's cranium, fearing treachery. Around five minutes had passed before the first word was spoken. With such strong moments, the fact that the Croatian text might be unintelligible to foreign ears proved a minor problem. Over half of Shakespeare's text had in fact been cut in favor of a constant flow of such stage imagery.

Another particularly potent sequence was set in Macbeth's castle immediately before Duncan's murder. Lady Macbeth (in a magnificent performance by Branka Trlin) emerged from behind a tarpaulin where Duncan, a tyrant with no qualms about exercising his royal prerogative, had just bedded her. After a postcoital wash, she plunged her hands into the water and pulled out two daggers which seemed to have materialized from the seed she had just rinsed off her legs. In an instant, the action shifted as Lady Macbeth leapt on top of a nearby well and began brandishing the knives in slow motion, her dripping legs bathed in a hellish green light filtering up through a grate. The effect was as if the murder weapons had sprung from Lady Macbeth's loins. The only sound was her breathing, a slow and rhythmic series of gasps. Banquo (Nebojsa Borojevic) then crept onstage with his son Fleance (Goran Borojevic), whistling intently at imagined forest beasts as the unseen Lady Macbeth continued to carve the air behind him. This turned out to be a premonition of the murder of Banquo, which in this interpretation was carried out by none other than Lady Macbeth, Banquo's old flame and mother of Fleance; Lady Macbeth insinuated herself into the murder plot as the unnamed third murderer in order to save her only son. Enter Macbeth for the “Is this a dagger” speech—the weapons he hs seen are those held aloft by Lady Macbeth, which he duly takes to murder Duncan. Lady Macbeth has thus knowingly spurred the only emotion that would arouse his passions to the requisite temperature: jealousy.

Baranowski's many bold strokes included making the incorporeal spirit of all characters just as real as their physical presence. Thus characters could instantly become witches or other apparitions—witness Lady Macbeth with her knives. In Macbeth's own words, “Nothing is but what is not.” Baranowski showed what happens if we take Macbeth at his word, and gave us a world where reality and phantasmagoria are on an equal footing. Other notable choices included Ladies Macbeth and MacDuff, Lennox, and a black-caped Duncan incarnated as witches, wallowing in each other's misery with orgiastic pleasure as a huge Croatian flag flapped in the breeze and a cross burned over the city behind them; Macbeth trying to burrow his way head first into the refuge of Lady Macbeth's womb, with then Ross doing the same to Lady Macduff; and the climax, an apocalyptic parody of a Balkan toast in which the blind drunk Malcolm and his lackeys smashed dozens of empty bottles on the ground in honor of his ascendancy as the latest warlord.

Perhaps the production's main weakness was precisely that amidst such unrelenting doom there was little or no moral movement, no recognizable loss and regaining of a state of grace. Yet simply experiencing the emotionally rich orchestration of movement, voice, and sound proved strangely cathartic and deeply moving. Those attending were apparently drawn in by this singular vision of Macbeth's inner world—by the end of the week the theatre was packed to the gills, with the local audience intently watching each new atrocity.