To summon up witches is to play with fire. Could the same be true about summoning up a dead playwright? That is what writer/director Zinnie Harris does in her audacious conjuring of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. It is not so much a revival as an exhumation, one in which she dares to speculate what the playwright might have done had he been true to his own instincts.
For this is a tragedy in which it is not Lady Macbeth but her husband who is mentally unbalanced by the couple’s murderous path to power. Now, Macbeth is the one who, having been told he will sleep no more, becomes ever more delusional. The man who thinks he sees the ghost of Banquo is the same man who goes on to cry, “out damned spot”.
This is – or, at least, it so dearly wants to be – Lady Macbeth’s play, and in the hands of a superb Nicole Cooper, she is a woman invested with certainty, drive and political nous. Adam Best’s Macbeth is a little in awe of her. He has a charm of his own and the capability – however reluctant – to use brute force, but he needs her clarity of vision. How else to believe their power grab is not the act of despots but the necessary manoeuvres of an upwardly mobile couple?
She makes it all seem so reasonable, which is why it makes sense when she takes over the regal paperwork and starts giving the orders to compensate for his incapacity. That is, it makes sense to us and to her, but to the characters in the play, she is confounding gender expectations. They start addressing her as king, as if to write her out of the story, a woman made invisible for failing to buckle under pressure.
Thus it is in this theatrical seance – Shakespeare asserts himself, the weight of tradition on his side, forcing the plot back on course as it silences the woman who would be its protagonist. If it loses something in concision, as domestic backstory delays blunt action, it gains in disruptiveness; sometimes witty, always intelligent, and with Lizzie Powell’s magnificent lighting giving form to Tom Piper’s depthless set, arresting to watch.
Macbeth (An Undoing) is at the Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh, until 25 February.
