Macbett

Eugène Ionesco

Ionesco strips down power and its mechanisms through humour, exaggeration and paradox.


Ionesco’s Macbett turns Shakespeare’s Macbeth into a comic tale of ambition, corruption, cowardice and excess, creating a tragic farce that takes human madness to its wildest extremes. The confirmation of the undeniable destructive impulses of a humanity that is moved by envy, jealousy and the conviction that only those who hold power can become free.

___________________________________________________________________________________________________

Macbett is a tragic farce that Ionesco wrote in 1972 inspired by Elizabethan tragedy, Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi, and Jan Kott's opinions. Kott said that Shakespeare wanted to show in his play that absolute power necessarily corrupts and that there is something criminal about all power. But Shakespeare was perhaps thinking about the possibility of an honest version of power. For Ionesco, as for Jarry, the notion of good power is a fallacy. They both expose power by ripping off its mask of goodness and stripping away its disguise of justice.


With Macbett, Ionesco makes us laugh at our own brutality, which is absurd and inconsequential but that hands out pain like someone giving thanks. In a brilliant play, full of formal and textual findings, fast-paced and full of surprises, he warns us that totalitarianism is always ready to return if those who wield power (and their dogs) are not closely watched because, no matter how hard it is for us to recognise, all politicians carry the seed of tyranny in their pockets.


Ramon Simó, director of the show.

• Show included in the season tickets.
• Book with the text of the show for 5 €. New TNC collection.