Living on/off the Stage

I was playing Macbeth on the stage that night. I was moving towards the door with a dagger in my hand. A light from the far end of the stage streamed on to my face. At that moment, I happened to see through the corner of my eye a young girl seated on the first row of the audience. I hesitated for a moment and rapidly cast my eyes over the entire audience. Everyone was sitting spell-bound in an atmosphere of hushed silence. At that moment something happened to me. I had always thought that life on the stage was somehow unreal and that the people watching me were truly real. I was, however, seized by a sudden thought : What if it was so that the audience was unreal and the events unfolding before my eyes truly real? I was going to kill Duncan and I had mesmerised everyone to a state of inactivity. They had forgotten their world and were living under my spell. And then I thought : what if both me, Macbeth and the audience were equally real? That the audience was creating Macbeth through me by looking at me and I had become an instrument in the will of the audience?

I felt like a magician hypnotising a crowd. Only I knew that I was outside the spell that I had cast. I had become like a spider that is not caught in its own web. Later that night, when the play was over, I realized that I had to change some of the words of the Bard : 'Every stage is a world unto itself, and all the men and the women on it are their own audience.'