The great thing about canonical works is that you can do whatever the hell you want to them – rip them up, rearrange them, even mock them mercilessly – and they’ll survive intact for the next generation to endorse or butcher. So it is for Shakespeare’s vice-like tragedy Macbeth, which gets a kind of fleecing here by the UK playwright Zinnie Harris. It’s subtitled “An Undoing”, a play on Lady Macbeth’s “what’s done cannot be undone” line and a manifesto of sorts.
It opens promisingly, with Natasha Herbert as a character who could be one of the weird sisters or perhaps the porter at hell’s gate. She ushers in the play while warning us about audience expectations and the rigidity of role-play, establishing a meta-theatricality that will prove germane later on. Then she introduces the bloody soldier (Khisraw Jones-Shukoor) and the play proper begins, cleaving for a while to Shakespeare’s contours while introducing some curious changes of its own.
