Macbeth | Breathing new life into Shakespeare

Shakespeare for schools is an attempt by director Justin Audibert to bring Shakespeare closer to a ‘younger audience’: school children, especially those who may have been disillusioned by endless GCSE English lessons analysing iambic pentameter, may not have had the chance to step back and simply appreciate gripping Shakespearean narratives, such as Macbeth.

Macbeth is a play that you would think well-suited to an adaptation of this kind – with satisfying amounts of black magic, murder, and back-stabbing, which Audibert, together with the cast and team, attempt to exploit to the fullest extent. The play’s pace is rapid and the scenes action-packed, with the production’s length half that of the traditional script, making for an engaging storyline that makes it difficult not to become engrossed in. The characters are expressive: Macbeth (Nana Amoo-Gottfried) delivers animated soliloquies, which were fairly terrifying; Lady Macbeth (Madeline Appiah) is as tragic as you could hope for – the cold ghosts of her terrible deeds haunting the Dorfman Theatre as she attempts to wash a perennial smear of non-existent blood off her hands as she stares blankly through the audience, pupils the size of pinholes. From the off, there was the immediate evocation of a tribal atmosphere. A thunderous, rhythmic percussion complements much of the action, with war drums banging in a regular rhythm: sound is evidently a major part of this performance – a part of the attempt, it seems, to keep younger viewers of the play interested – and it seems to work. Actors in ragged clothes run round chanting and bashing sticks together, with the odd haunting Gaelic chant giving a nod to the play’s original Scottish setting.

What I found particularly odd, were the strange anachronisms that introduced themselves now and again – notably Macbeth dons a WW1-era gas-mask at several points. While my initial thoughts were that they were short on props, it became clear that this was a deliberate theme, with jerry cans and metal flasks popping up everywhere. It was refreshing to see Macbeth performed in such a different way, but I felt the mix of tribe-like culture and post-apocalyptic society were too much with too little explanation and were potentially confusing. Although the fast pace of the play, combined with the archaic language, did make it slightly difficult to understand the finer points at times, this was compensated for by other methods of exposition: there is much movement in the play, and many thrilling fight scenes to keep the story moving, all different in their own way – eerie necromancy being practiced in one mad scrum turns into a rough knife-fight to the death in the next. Despite an arguably docile scene at the end, where a gas mask is raised into the air in triumph, as opposed to a real head, in general they don’t skimp on the gruesome details: in one particularly horrifying moment Lady Macbeth’s throat is slit in a frankly horrifying display which would satisfy the hunger for gore of the greediest viewers.

It seems as though Audibert wished the characters to stay true to much of the original dialogue – Shakespearean language is, of course, part of the experience – with the occasional addition, and frequent omission to cut the performance to a more manageable length, allowing for scenes to focus on other aspects such as physical movement. The abridgement of the script was done well: the story didn’t really feel as if it was missing anything and flowed throughout. Most importantly, the production accomplished its goal of adapting Macbeth to enthuse younger audiences about the works of the literary behemoth, whose plays are often unfairly stereotyped as difficult or outdated. The creative way in which the story of Macbeth was told throws a new light on Shakespeare and begs the question of why – given the success of a TV show like Game of Thrones, which is similar in terms of the combination of kingly power-struggles, violence, and betrayal – tales like Macbeth don’t have just as much of a passionate following among the youth of today. Perhaps the old tales simply need new voices.