“Fascinating this play is, but just why I cannot say.” Zinnie Harris asks ‘what if’ with Macbeth (an undoing), but raises more questions than it answers.
📍Festival Theatre, Edinburgh
📅 4 to 25 Feb
💷 From £15 – See website for details
🕖 Evenings 7.30pm | Matinees 2:30pm
🕖 Running time (approx.): 2 hour 40 minutes + (20 min interval)
👍 Produced by: Royal Lyceum Theatre Edinburgh
🎬 Writer/Director: Zinnie Harris after William Shakespeare
🎶 Composer: Oguz Kaplangi
🎵 Sound Designer: Pippa Murphy
💡 Lighting Designer: Lizzie Powell
🔨 Set Designer: Tom Piper
⚒️ Costume Designer & Associate Set Designer: Alex Berry
🎂 Parental Discretion
🎭BSL Interpreted: 21 Feb 7:30pm
🎭Audio Described & Touch Tour: 22 Feb 7:30pm, Touch Tour Timing TBC
🎭Captioned, Audio Described & Touch Tour: 25 Feb 2:30pm, Touch Tour Timing TBC
Zinnie Harris appears discontented with the Bard’s telling of Macbeth, particularly where it comes to the fate of Lady M (Nicole Cooper). Macbeth (an undoing) is therefore a ‘what if’ story…what if Macbeth (Adam Best) copped all the guilt and madness due to murdering everyone in their path to power, and she held it together? After all, it is she who smashes through her husband’s reservations over Regicide, calling him “too full o’ the milk of human kindness”. So, why should she so abruptly lose it and kill herself off stage? She isn’t the one seeing murdered friends at the banquet table after all.
The first act, give or take, follows William’s lead, though with a little rearranging of the narrative chairs. Harris’s main intervention is to make a chorus of the Weird Sisters, Carlin (Liz Kettle), Missy (Star Penders), and childish Mae (Matilde Sabino Hunt, Farrah Anderson Fryer, Bella Svaasand). To Kettle falls the honour to open the show, chastising the audience’s appetite for blood, misery, and a faithful following of well-kent rails of the story.
The acting is fine, the chimaera text delivered with relish, and conviction. Cooper has presence in spades, more than enough to take on the play’s narrative yoke. Best is very much in her shadow, his Macbeth falling from battle-won glory into mental collapse faster than Lady M ever did. This is a weak human, easily bent to his wife’s designs, an inheritor of lines surrounding irremovable spots and unclean hands.
Lady MacDuff (Jade Ogugua) also enjoys a far beefier role than prior, upgraded from bit part murder victim to Lady M’s cousin, and confidente. She’s having a fling with Banquo (James Robinson), whilst her husband (Paul Tinto) gads about seeing to King Duncan’s (Marc Mackinnon) needs.
The staging is somewhere between bare bones and hyper-stylised, shorn of the least hint of moorland and plaid, in favour of mirrored walls, sparse furniture, and early 20th century militaria. It certainly affords Cooper with an abundance of stylish white cocktail gowns fated for bloody stains.
It’s in the second act, that Harris dials the divergence up to 11. Now in charge, Lady M runs smack into the immortal phenomenon of gendered identities. She cannot be Queen if in charge her flunkies declare, so she’s the King. The Queen is still in the infirmary, unsleeping, and unfit for office. It is in exploring in Lady M’s fate as prime author of the play’s horrors that Harris delves into a psychology moulded by infertility in an age when breeding is a noble woman’s main function, and where female aspiration is prone to being burned at the stake.
The play achieves a most strange effect, being interesting, but ultimately baffling. It’s unquestionably too long at 2 hours 40 minutes, lingering overlong in wordy dialogues, and curious, often comic, departures. Between a shaky fourth wall, as Cooper becomes aware of stage assistants, to the repositioning of the Three Witches as agents with unclear agendas, something is being attempted here. It’s just that despite a slick, passionate performance, it’s never quite clear what that is.
When the end descends, it’s every bit as gory as Shakespeare’s original, but it’s not entirely clear what has been added to the conversation. There’s an epilogue just to make it a little more confusing, and one cannot escape the idea that Harris is trying to redeem a character she has, if anything, made an even worse human being than before. Fascinating this play is, but just why I cannot say.
Macbeth (an undoing) will play the Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh from 4 to 25 Feb. It is produced by Royal Lyceum Theatre Edinburgh, supported by The Stephen W Dunn Theatre Fund.
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Things get… different… when modernized to include women with agency – because their side of the story was always before told by men, and worse, men who didn’t care about or understand the (possible) interior life of those women.
And the male playwrights would have been laughed at if they had, so it was basically the way we were.
The Wide Sargasso Sea (haven’t read – just know what it’s about) is a similar attempt for a different version of Jane Eyre from Rochester’s first wife’s perspective.
As a woman who earned a PhD in a man’s subject (Nuclear Engineering) and was the only woman in her cohort, the subject of historical treatment of women – which continues quite unabated in most of the world – is a touchy subject, and I prefer not to spend too much time looking back, which may be as bad as the weird ‘modernizations’ which overdo it so oddly sometimes.
I did my bit for women’s rights back in the day, and have settled into writing my own novels now, because the one thing they lied about was that women CAN do it all – or that we could in the 70s. No one told us what it would really cost. I paid with my health for the 13 years after grad school I got to do what I loved, with the additional coup de grace of getting sick at a physics conference where I was presenting a paper! Stress cannot be banned by fiat.
Give the playwright lots of credit for trying.
Absolutely, hence my fascination but leaving me not quite sure why. I think it’s always tough to rewrite old plays, sometimes I think we find we might be better off trying something completely different ie Rozencrantz and Gildenstern.