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Orson Welles and his actors rehearsed Macbeth, which would be the first production of the classical division. The notion of doing the play had come from Welles's wife Virginia, who saw the potential in setting it in Haiti at the end of the eighteenth century at the court of the Emperor Jean Christophe. Houseman was delighted, and Welles and his designer Nat Karson set to work with passion, researching the period and the curious figure of the gigantic Grenadan slave who had become an emperor: leader of the Haitian forces of insurrection, he was first elected President, then after a furious civil war, Napoleonically crowned himself. As Henri I, his vigorous rule was marred by avarice and cruelty; eventually his people revolted, and, cornered, he shot himself. The parallels with Shakespeare's hero are clear enough. For Welles the element in the transportation that really attracted him was that it enabled him to make supernatural scenes a credible centre of the play." 'No event in the art galleries this week', wrote the New York Times art critic, 'could hope to rival in barbaric splendour the transmogrification of Macbeth by members of the Negro Theatre...deplore as one may the impenetrable fog that separated these swart thespians and the bard himself, the stage pictures at any rate constitute a sumptuous pageant of colour, form, pattern and movement, keyed to the pulsebeat of voodoo drums'." Extracts from 'Re/Birth of a Nation' by Richard J. Powell,
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