DESCRIPTIONS
Macbeth
A dark, political thriller by William Shakespeare
Macbeth has always seemed among the most modern of the Bard’s plays, and contemporary world issues throw its themes into sharp relief: backroom conniving, naked ambition, insider dealing, moral ambiguity, hypocrisy, and corruption at the highest levels… Base qualities run deep in the human psyche, but not so deep that Shakespeare couldn’t lay them bare.
From the very earliest years, Mull Theatre has staged some of world’s classic plays. Shakespeare’s Tempest and King Lear appeared in the 1960s, and as late as the 1980s a puppet version of Macbeth played Dervaig and toured the country. By way of a tribute to the pioneering and creative spirit of Barrie and Marianne Hesketh, we now stage a new production of Shakespeare’s “Scottish play” - 400 years of Macbeth helps celebrate 40 years of Mull Theatre.
Mull Theatre’s 2006 production is dynamic, inventive, imaginative and theatrical, with elements of thriller and adventure as well as the supernatural. It is not set in any specific time or place, emphasising its universal impact.
DISCUSSION NIGHT August 23rd: you are invited to stay after the show and join in a discussion of the play with the cast and director.
Suitable for age 12+
PRESS REVIEW
MACBETH ****
It's with a distinct nod to the past, though, and to the unique atmosphere of the Little Theatre, that Alasdair McCrone has chosen to build his final season there around a tiny, jewel-like production of Macbeth, adapted for a cast of five.
A legendary puppet version of Macbeth was one of the greatest hits of the Hesketh era and Alicia Hendrick's remarkable design for this new stripped-down version of the play uses the full depth of the space behind the theatre's little stage. She creates a dark, sinister double hall of mirrors, lit by lurid flashes of golden light, that perfectly reflects the terrible inner world of dreams, illusions and violent imaginings that grips Macbeth's mind from his first encounter with the witches.
It has to be said that the effort to tell Shakespeare's great story with only five actors, plus a couple of extras, sometimes leads McCrone to extreme measures. The porter appears only by way of a tiny video screen; the bloody soldier who reports Macbeth's victory in the opening scene is a shivering filmed image on a bloodstained sheet; the show's single presiding witch, played with terrific demonic force by Fiona Colliss, can only be multiplied into three with the clever use of distorting mirrors; and the acting is a shade uneven, sometimes matching the intensity of the production, sometimes losing focus a little.
In the end, though, this is a production that makes a tremendous virtue of necessity, using its limited resources, and its need to range across different media, to plunge deep into the nightmarish and delusional landscape of Macbeth's mind.
The visual images are often breathtaking, Martin Low's complex, eerie music and soundscape haunt the mind. The Mull Company can be proud of a closing production that exploits the rugged, claustrophobic potential of the Little Theatre as thoroughly and imaginatively as any show I've ever seen there.
JOYCE MCMILLAN, THE SCOTSMAN
