Before we start, let me say this …….. this is the 550th consecutive daily blog post under Artis80.

(1) Macbeth. Washington’s Shakespeare Theatre recently featured a production of Macbeth starring Ralph Fiennes and Indira Varma as the loving couple. It ran for about a month in an unusual space that had room for a very limited audience, so limited that all Shakespeare subscribers were not able to see the production. It had rave reviews.

Luckily, the same production ran in London last year and was filmed. Same cast, and also directed by Simon Godwin, the artistic director of DC’s Shakespeare Theatre. The movie version is being shown this weekend, and we saw it at Shakespeare’s Harmon Theatre last night.

Maybe it’s just a Shakespeare thing. Yesterday, you might recall, I wrote about Richard III, and compared the Richard III character is Shakespeare’s play of that name (evil incarnate) with the Richard III character in Josephine Tey’s 1951 book The Daughter of Time. Tey’s book, and current scholarship, find that the early histories of Richard III (the last of the Plantagenet kings) were written during the early days of the Tudor kings (Richard’s enemies and successors) and most likely portrayed a much more balanced individual as demonic.

In Macbeth, the title character is also a pretty evil guy (albeit with a now and then conscience) married to a pretty evil woman (without a conscience, but who does appear to go mad at the end). Whether the real Macbeth (about whom not much appears to be really known) is as evil as portrayed by Shakespeare is also a question. And, although Shakespeare in Macbeth had to be more creative in his plot and character development than he did in Richard III, there are parallels.

In Richard, Shakespeare based his play on historical writing by which the Tudors had to prove their legitimacy as the rulers of England, and in Macbeth, as I understand it, Shakespeare wrote to please King James I of the Scottish Stuarts, who identified themselves as descendants of Banquo’s sons.

As to the production itself, it lived up to the reviews, unsurprisingly. But the real question is whether it would have been better to have seen the play than the filmed version of the play. I guess there are benefits on both sides, although I would guess that seeing the play might have been the preferable experience. With the film, although you might pick up more of the audio, you lose the spontaneity of live theater, and more importantly, although you get to see closeups of the actors, these are closeups of actors playing on stage, and not playing to the screen. What do I mean by this? I mean that, particularly in their soliloquies, when on stage, the actors might look as if they are talking to themselves, but when filmed, they all seem to be looking just above the camera – it’s a bit disconcerting to me. They look like they are trying to talk to the movie audience (which is not what they are doing), but don’t know exactly where the camera is.

But it was a nice night, access by Metro was easy, we ran into friends we hadn’t seen in a long time, and had an interesting talk with our seat neighbor, who actually had seen the stage version as well.

(2) A Loving God. I should probably not even start this, but here goes, as succinctly as I can be. We heard Rabbi Shai Held, the president of the Hadar Institute, a Jewish learning organization, speak yesterday afternoon and this morning at Adas Israel. Held is a well respected scholar and administrator, and the author of a new book called Judaism is About Love, which he wrote to contradict the oft stated axiom that the Old Testament God is a God of Vengeance and the New Testament God a God of Love (which Held says is one of the only antisemitic tropes that still has a life of its own). The book, published about two months ago, has had very strong reviews, and I am curious about it.

I must say, however, that I didn’t find the two sessions with Held very inspiring. In fact, I went to the session this morning to give him a second chance after yesterday’s talk. My problems (maybe not worth writing about) is that I don’t believe in a God with human emotions – to me that is a form of anthropomorphism that is old school. Held, although he says that “love” as a human emotion and “love” as maintained by God are two different things (or perhaps one thing, but on two different levels), conceives of a God who has love. And Held demonstrates his understanding of God’s love (again this is what I got from his two talks, not from his book) by cherry picking verses from the Bible and ignoring others, or saying that the others are not part of the core of the biblical message. He also seems to accept the “truth” of stories of God in the Bible as being accurate (maybe no historically accurate, but spiritually accurate, if that makes sense).

He talks about the covenant between God and the Jewish people as being upheld by God even when the Jewish people ignore it. To me, that makes no sense. I don’t think there is a God who drafted a covenant. I think the covenant is man made, and therefore can continue as a matter of faith whether or not it is followed; and because there is no thinking God on the other side, there is no way for God to get out of it even if God wanted to. (Am I making sense?)

He contrasted his theology to “process theology”, about which I know nothing except that I understand it is a way of looking at the world as being unfinished, and having a partnership between humans and God to perfect it. That is sort of a bottom up theology that involves mankind actively. On the other hand, it seems that Held’s theology is top down – looking at it from God’s perspective, something that I am unable to do.

I know, I really should read the book before criticizing Held on the basis of two short talks. Maybe I will – but you know, this isn’t the kind of book I normally read (or that I am able to finish if I start to read it).