"History," wrote a German sage of some repute, "repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce." Whether or not this holds true; more, whether or not tragedy itself is a farce, may well be the most evocative problematic raised by Maja Kleczewska's interpretation of Shakespeare's 'Macbeth,' featured in the "Teatr Powszechny" in Opole, Poland.

"The weird sisters." -Macbeth, IV, 1 Kleczewska's "Macbeth" takes the ostentatious step of making Shakespeare's witches - weirder. Rather than witches, the drama unfolds with what appear to be two transvestites and a prostitute. Such an opening salvo may initially be regarded as an application of stereotypically modern crassness to an ancient classic, but Kleczewska's apparent genius lies in the fact that she recognizes modernity as effectively crass, thus trans mutating Shakespeare's "weirdness" from an acknowledgment of the mystic frontiers of Fortuna into a representation of modern decadence. This very transmutation is essentially the foundation for the plays' dialectic regarding the possibility of tragedy and the question of farce. While equally grotesque, Shakespeare's witches preserve in their mystic nature a spark of recognition for the metaphysical landscape upon which human tragedy finds ground to grow. Hubris is possible precisely when man has at least an idea of go