In Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Lady Macbeth begins the play as the driving force who ruthlessly plans and implements regicide. But she soon disappears from the action and re-emerges in the last Act, guilt-ridden, hallucinating and tormented by sleep deprivation. What happened? Zinnie Harris imagines what might be the gaps in Shakespeare’s story, undoing the play as we know it and retelling it with Lady Macbeth at its center.
Setting the play in 1930s Scotland during an economic depression and the pre-World War II rise of fascism, Harris incorporates Shakespeare’s original text both as written and reassigned to other characters, as well as integrating her own language. She also introduces class into the action in assertive ways, as Shakespeare’s play mostly excludes Scotland’s underclass.
Theatre for a New Audience in association with Rose Theatre, London present this Royal Lyceum Theatre Edinburgh production.
