Katabasis in Rupert Goold's Macbeth (BBC, 2010): Threshold-Crossing, Education, Shipwreck, Visionary and Trial Katabatic Experiences

Rupert Goold's stage production of Macbeth opened at the Minerva Theatre in Chichester, went to the Gielgud Theatre (London) and toured to the Harvey Theater in New York (2007-2008) before, in 2010, BBC, PBS and Illuminations Media turned it into a TV film.1 Set in a twentieth-century regime displaying the iconography of Stalin's dictatorship, Anthony Ward's decor was "confined within a windowless basement kitchen, perhaps a few tiers above hell" (Nicholas De Jongh). Unsurprisingly, several reviewers compare these aspects of the scenography with a living hell. However, the recording turned those hellish textures into a dominant motif.