Writer: William Shakespeare (adapted by Catriona Clancy)
Director: Emma Copland
A castle is attacked. The people in it, including children, are savagely murdered. A grieving parent vows revenge. The opening of Lady Macbeth Uncut represents a kind of prequel to Shakespeare’s tragedy.
The scene parallels the slaughter of Macduff’s family in the second half of the play. In this rewritten beginning, the tyrannical king Duncan kills the ruler of Moray. Moray’s widow, Gruoch, swiftly marries a war hero called Macbeth and starts planning her route to justice, instructing her new husband to “assassinate Duncan.”
Gruoch was a real 11th-century Scottish queen and the historical model for Shakespeare’s infamous Lady Macbeth. In this feminist reframing, Gruoch’s backstory helps justify her later actions. She brings three gentlewomen with her from Moray, who disguise themselves as witches and help nudge Macbeth towards the crown. There are more plot twists to come, often reinforcing the importance of female solidarity.
Catriona Clancy, who plays Gruoch with nuance and authority, writes the play’s extra scenes and lines. The language is sometimes borrowed from other scenes or plays by Shakespeare. Dialogues between men in the original are often transferred to women, who control more of the action. Michael Ohren as Macbeth, in army fatigues or blood-stained tee-shirt, gives an interesting portrayal of a man whose grip on power and sanity becomes increasingly uncertain. Ohren’s tenuous grasp of his often-mangled lines inadvertently adds to the effect, but doesn’t help the pacing. The contrast between Lady Macbeth’s poise and her husband’s uneasiness is striking.
Clancy can also convey the torture of a troubled mind. She echoes the vocal sleepwalking sigh that Judi Dench gives as a powerful Lady Macbeth in the filmed 1970s RSC production. The show also draws inspiration from an interview with Helen Mirren in 2023, where the veteran actor says too many of Shakespeare’s female roles, including “Lady M”, are “horribly underwritten”. In reanimating the historical Gruoch, later caricatured as a “fiendlike queen”, Clancy reinterprets all the female characters.
Playing both gentlewoman/witch Coira and Lady Macduff, Emmy Happisburgh is assured and versatile. Fellow witches Sally Sharp and Maggie Saunders as Morag and Eilidh are distinct and watchable. In this version, Lady Macbeth addresses her demands, “Come, you spirits/That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here”, directly to her complicit gentlewomen. Their individual reactions to the speech range from shock to delight.
Alex Walton gives a moving and sensitive performance as Macduff, while Alexander HJ Smith plays both Banquo and Rosse with commitment. Sound designer Anna Short modulates a wonderfully unsettling sequence of stormy ocean waves, tolling bells, creaking doors, and Alex McLaren’s eerie music.
Najia Alavi’s minimalist set and costumes includes tartan bands that physically represent each thane’s power and leaf-decorated veils for the witches. A length of white sheet becomes the tablecloth at a feast or a sea of rippling waves that allow a corpse to disappear. A red wedding sash and gold brocade crowns are enough to stage the Macbeths’ wedding and coronations. This is a flawed but ambitious show, exploring the challenges of female agency and the cyclical nature of violence, political themes that are complex and all too topical.
Runs until 26 October 2024
The Reviews Hub Score
Feminist reframing
