When the tyrant finally falls in Macbeth, Shakespeare wraps things up with haste—a brisk coronation speech, a redistribution of titles, and straight to the pub. Thrice, co-directed by Al Seed and Judith Milligan for Al Seed Productions, is interested in the mess left behind. Who cleans the blood off the flagstones? Who drags the dead away?
Taking the weird sisters’ arithmetic literally—‘thrice to thine, and thrice to mine, and thrice again to make up nine’—Seed and Milligan swap the usual cackling trio for a chorus of nine women. Costumed by Zephyr Liddell in coarse linen, heavy skirts, workaday aprons, and knitted cowls, there isn’t a novelty cauldron or pointed hat in sight. They look like the grim, stoic survivors of an unending siege, gathered around an old stone well to pick through the wreckage of someone else’s war.
A mystery play beneath a dying sun
That, at least, is the official premise. For me, having arrived at the Traverse equipped with only a fuzzy idea of what Thrice was actually about, it felt less like post-Jacobean drama and more like a ritual mystery play staged thousands of years in the future beneath a dying sun—an ancient folk rite pieced together from scraps of Macbeth transmitted by Chinese whispers down the centuries.
This mysterious production happily straddles the worlds of contemporary dance and physical theatre, quite content to be both, or neither. Under Lina Limosani’s choreographic direction, that dual identity yields genuine theatrical weight. The nine performers—Ashley Smith, Jessie Roberts-Smith, Maya Bodiley, Alys Williams, Tess Letham, Jennifer Steele, Monet Debois, Samuela Noumtchuet, and Sarah Farrell—operate less like an ensemble of individual actors and more like a single, responsive machine.
“For me, having arrived at the Traverse equipped with only a fuzzy idea of what Thrice was actually about, it felt less like post-Jacobean drama and more like a ritual mystery play staged thousands of years in the future…”
Their physical vocabulary is heavy, rooted, and unapologetically disciplined. Limosani dispenses with fluid, decorative gestures in favour of heavy percussive force. In the show’s most arresting passages, the company moves shoulder-to-shoulder, striking the Traverse stage with synchronised boot-heels to send shocks up through the tiered seating. The movement is punctuated by guttural choral work: sharp exhalations, low throat-clearing rumbles, and sudden collective gasps that sound like air being sucked into a vacuum.
This is also how Shakespeare’s presence occasionally surfaces in the room—not through coherent scenes, but through garbled, disembodied fragments. Snatches of original dialogue pepper proceedings like half-remembered liturgical chants, muttered or spat into the gloom with their original context worn away. The plot itself survives only as fossilised ritual: sudden, clinical depictions of execution carried out in silence by detached trios, or a battered metal crown passed along the line like radioactive waste, handled with trembling hands and averted faces by women terrified of catching its curse.
Shadows, scorched earth, and sub-bass
That feeling of watching an excavated, alien liturgy is driven home by the technical craft. Alberto Santos Bellido’s lighting keeps the Traverse in near-subterranean gloom, slicing through the murk with low-angled amber shafts that throw towering, monstrous shadows up the back walls.
Beneath it all, Guy Veale’s sound design rumbles through the auditorium floor with low-frequency drones and the agonising screech of bowed strings pulled to snapping point. It acts as an oppressive acoustic vice, so that when the sound abruptly cuts out, the collective, ragged breathing of nine physically spent performers fills the silence with startling force.
A liturgy without a scripture
Yet for all its atmospheric success, Thrice remains an infuriatingly closed book. One senses a deep sea of meaning beneath every gesture, glance, and unison stamp, but it stays out of reach beneath layers of abstracted ritual for anyone unaware of its creators’ thoughts.
“That feeling of watching an excavated, alien liturgy is driven home by the technical craft.“
Also, at fifty minutes, the running time is lean, but the reliance on repetition periodically drains the dramatic momentum. For example, one deconstructed Scottish reel—where the dancers lock arms before peeling away into frantic, solitary spins—is initially a terrific physical image of a community fracturing under grief. But repeated and reset without developing the stakes, the staging begins to insulate itself from the room. We are left admiring an intricate, beautifully executed rite without being handed the scripture behind it.
Thrice is a stubborn, elusive piece of theatre. It refuses to offer easy handrails, but as an uncompromising piece of physical craft—and a strange, post-apocalyptic echo of Scottish tragedy—its images carry a lingering, eerie power.
All Images: Thrice Al Seed Productions – Credit Alberto Santos Bellido
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