Weird Sisters

For the record, I tacked on the Weird Sister’s Fair is foul… lines from the opening of Macbeth to the end of the famous Double Double bit from Act 4, Scene 1 because I like those lines and it added a sort of finality to the scene, as if the witches were having a session, and I wanted a bit more witchy interplay at the end, kind of implying that they’re voices from the same wily consciousness.

I first recited this scene from Macbeth with the Weird Sisters when I was in high school. We had to pick a random scene from the play (other than Macbeth’s famous soliloquy) and set up a time to recite it. I showed up after school and did the entire scene as basically one witch, the mad-cap, hi-frequency one in this recording (Witch #2). I was younger and my capacity to do hi-pitched, squealing voices was a bit more expansive than at present.

On that, I learned this week that when I do a character, it sounds very different in my head than it does when recorded. I’ve been reading Terry Pratchett’s Witches series to my daughter over the past months and I thought my Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg were pretty damn good. Over the course of the past week, however, I casually dropped to a few friends that my next project would be the Macbeth witches, and that I already had the voices for 2 of them, though I was struggling with the 3rd. I confidently reeled off a few lines with my outstanding witchtones to a few friends, who looked a bit sceptical.

I was surprised to find out that the two witches I had ‘figured out’ sounded much more, well, mannish, once I finally recorded myself doing them (well, natch). Hi-pitched Witch #2 came out pretty well, with a few adjustments, but Witch #3 (who I fancied would sound a bit bullfrogish) came out sounding like a Sith Lord and Witch #1 (the one I hadn’t figured out) ended up as a modified Granny Weatherwax. All things considered, I suppose for a man with a relatively deep voice endeavouring to record three women doing witch stuff, I did OK. I’d have loved to perfect the voices a bit more, but I was literally re-recording for about 5 hours and my voice was so strained and cracked that I was happy just to be able to get all three ladies recorded in some form. Perfect is the enemy of done!

Funnily enough, in Shakespeare’s time the witches would certainly have been performed by men, as women were forbidden from the acting profession, as we saw played out in the ingenious and endlessly re-watchable Shakespeare in Love. I also played the characters up as a bit comical, and I was gratified to find that this was a pretty good interpretation. Modern depictions of the Weird Sisters have often tended towards the horrific and morbid, as in Roman Polanski’s 1971 film where they’re part of a huge, naked-lady cult, or the 2006 Australian Macbeth there they’re goth chicks wrecking a cemetery, or the 2010 BBC Macbeth where they’re battlefield nurses who chant over bodies in a morgue. As with any great Disney villain, the witches must be as comical and charming as they are horrific: the audience likes them despite their propensity for trickery and evil.