Forty Years Since Banquo
Forty years ago, I stood on a stage at Eureka College and played Banquo in Macbeth . It is strange to write those words now. We were not trained Shakespearean actors. We were college students taking on one of Shakespeare’s darkest and most demanding plays, and we did not have years of classical training behind us. What we had was passion. Much of that came from our director, Kevin McQuade, who pushed us to make the play our own. We created a modern interpretation of Macbeth , not treating Shakespeare as something distant or museum-like, but as something immediate and alive. The language was still Shakespeare’s, but the energy belonged to us. The ambition, violence, fear, suspicion, and guilt did not feel centuries old. They felt human. They felt current. For young actors, that gave us a way into the play. I played Banquo, and forty years later, I still remember most of my lines, including his soliloquy at the beginning of Act III : “Thou hast it now: King, Cawdor, Glamis, all, as the w...
