Staging Macbeth

I went to see the Guthrie Theater's production of Macbeth last night. Thanks to DB's Big Brothers, Big Sisters connection, we had free tickets in row H, dead center. Awesome. The performances were all quite good.
MacDuff's son in particular blew me away. It's not easy to be a kid with multiple lines of Shakespeare. (Alas, I can't remember which boy played him last night, as there are two that share the roll in alternating performances.) Michelle O'Neill as Lady Macbeth was fantastic as well. She played a very turned-on-by-power vampy Lady which made her descent into sleep-walking madness really incredible.

After the play, we had an interesting conversation about the decision to set it in alternate 1940s. We both agreed that what was fresh in the mid-90s--that taking Shakespeare out of it's literal time period and putting it somewhere else thing--is actually getting kind of old. We found ourselves wishing that maybe everybody had been running around in 11th century Scottish gear, rather than crisp military uniforms and pretty swing-dresses.
DB thought there is just too much jar between the setting and the language, that it takes even longer for your brain to start "speaking Shakespearean" than it does when you're faced with people in time-period correct costumes. To a certain extent, I agree. I think it's more that you have one more thing to try and figure out. Where are we? When are we? What did he say?

That said, we did roam down a "what non-11th century settings would work better" sort of path. Neither of these solves the head knot brought on by adjusting to setting and language at the same time, but roll with me on this one. I like it.

Macbeth, we decided, could be quite easily set in a sort of post-apocalyptic time. Thus, it makes sense for there to again be a king of Scotland as an entirely separate entity from the UK. The amount of knife fighting suddenly makes sense again if firearms have grown scarce post some sort of WW III. The presence of the Weird Sisters as a sort of we've returned to a more superstitious time makes sense again, and if the time period is already stressful, resource-low, etc., the madness is more believable again.

My favorite, however, was sort of a high-punk, super underground early 80s thing. Similar to what Luhrman did with his now-iconic Romeo and Juliet, the factions involved could be very much rival gangs. We're not talking kings and queens at all, we're just talking leaders with delusions of grandeur and inflated titles.
I also think the Weird Sisters as drugged out nutjobs is a rather fun image. Madness works well in this environment too...if everyone is a little strung out on stuff all the time.
It would have to be done carefully because the Macbeths' guilt-raddled visions are one of the most powerful things in this play, and if it gets played off too much as the result of his drug-delusions, it could lose something. (But I just keep thinking of the baby crawling on the ceiling in Trainspotting...it would work quite well with the ghost of Banquo.)

There's certainly still a language-jar, but somehow it feels more right in my mind than alternate 1940s. I can't explain precisely what didn't work, but something kept pulling me out of the moment. I didn't have this problem with a Napoleonic Hamlet and Twelfth Night. Victorian Midsummer Night's Dream also works well for me, but I just felt like Macbeth could have been staged better. ...so we fixed it, and now I have great desire to be a director.