Film Notes
“Voodoo Macbeth” Excerpt
from We Work Again (1937)
Production Company: U.S. Works Progress Administration. Transfer Note: Copied from a 35mm positive preprint preserved by the National Archives and Records Administration. Running Time: 4 minutes.
Featured in Treasures from American Film Archives: Encore Edition.
It had long been assumed that no sound or moving images survived from Orson Welles’s legendary “Voodoo Macbeth,” the Federal Theatre Project’s 1936 Harlem stage production of Shakespeare’s play, set in Haiti with an African American cast. But priceless historical footage can turn up within unlikely places. This long-forgotten record of the first professional play staged by Orson Welles was found in another film, the U.S. government-produced We Work Again, a Depression-era documentary on African American employment.
Orson Welles was twenty years old when he directed the Macbeth seen here. The offer came from his early mentor John Houseman, who had been appointed head of the Negro Theatre Unit of the WPA’s Federal Theatre Project. (The $23.86 per week salary was not an inducement. Welles’s radio voice already earned him a thousand dollars a week, much of which he spent on the production.) After mounting two newly commissioned plays by African Americans, the Negro Theatre Unit was looking to produce a “classical” play with a black cast. Welles’s concept—which he credited to his wife, Virginia Nicolson—was to move Macbeth from medieval Scotland to nineteenth-century Haiti and the court of Henri Christophe (1767?–1820), the former slave who proclaimed himself “King Henry I.” Key to the transposition, as Welles put it at the time, was that “the witch element in the play falls beautifully into the supernatural atmosphere of Haitian voodoo.” If few of the available black actors had experience with blank verse, that was all the better to Welles, who, throughout his career, made Shakespeare less highbrow, often by way of massive textual changes. After a long four-month rehearsal, Macbeth opened at the Lafayette Theater (7th Ave. at 133rd St.) on April 14, 1936.
Captured on film are the production’s final minutes: the arrival of the conquering army disguised as “Birnam Wood,” Macbeth’s death at the hands of Macduff, and “th’ usurper’s cursèd head” mounted “upon a pole.” The off-screen narrator of We Work Again could not be more wrong in telling us that “every line in the play has remained intact.” For those who know Shakespeare’s text well, the concluding moment is jolting. Welles brings back a character often cut altogether, the witch queen Hecate, transforms her into a man (played by Eric Burroughs), and gives him a final line—taken from the first act—reaffirming the witches’ power: “The charm’s wound up!”
Welles’s version thus ends not with the reestablishment of political order but with the return of repressed instincts. Macbeth is played by six-foot-four-inch Jack Carter, who had experience on Broadway in Porgy and experience in jail for murder. “The end, which is always somewhat confused,” commented Jean Cocteau after seeing the production, is transformed “into a superb ballet of ruin and death.”
Some mainstream reviewers carped about Welles’s alterations of Shakespeare, or chided the black voices for lacking “poetry.” However, even Brooks Atkinson in the New York Times conceded that “as an experiment in Afro-American showmanship the Macbeth merited the excitement that rocked the Lafayette last night. If it is witches you want, Harlem knows how to overwhelm you with their fury and phantom splendor.” Black reviewers saw something more, an African American–cast play that was neither stereotypical “folklore” nor a slick musical: Roi Ottley in Harlem’s Amsterdam News wrote, “In Macbeth the negro has been given an opportunity to discard the bandana and burnt-cork casting to play a universal character.” The play sold out its sixty-four-perfomance Harlem run (during which Welles reached voting age), with seats given away for each Monday’s performance on presentation of relief cards. Maurice Ellis, seen here as Macduff, took over the title role when the production went on national tour—overcoming the challenges facing a 110-member African American company moving through segregated cities. —Scott Simmon
Further Reading
The fullest account of the production is in Simon Callow’s Orson Welles: The Road to Xanadu (1995, Viking Press).
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