An essay accompanying the programme of Zinnie Harris’s latest adaptation tells us that the playwright has been engaged for the past 20 years in “a stealthily radical campaign of creative, feminist intervention in the western dramatic canon”. I find this surprising. Harris’s 2017 take on Henrik Ibsen, (The Fall of) The Master Builder, and 2019 reworking of John Webster, The Duchess (of Malfi), both seemed to me to undermine their female characters; the same could be said to happen here. Harris, who also directs, transforms Lady Macbeth (Nicole Cooper) and Lady Macduff (Jade Ogugua) into sister/cousins and the sort of entitled figures who would fit comfortably into a television costume drama, their interactions centring mainly on motherhood and menfolk – Macbeth (Adam Best), Macduff (Paul Tinto) and Banquo (James Robinson).
At first, the injection of contemporary dialogue and made-for-TV-style scenes into Shakespeare’s action feels promising: will the clash of forms spark new insights? It doesn’t. Instead, we are given banalities of backstories that feel like the leftovers from a development process. On to this mismatch are grafted meta-theatrical conceits: the “weird women” (or are they?) directly addressing the audience; actors coming out of character (or are they?) and issuing instructions to stagehands to produce props or costumes; and Lady Macbeth rewriting the “inevitable” conclusion (or does she?).
The actors perform with panache, but the characterisations are, for the most part, workaday. Tension, dynamism and rhythm in the production are created through the interplay of Tom Piper’s perspective-altering, mirrored flats with Lizzie Powell’s volumetric, chiaroscuro, sliced lighting, in conjunction with the mood-shifting industrial and natural sounds of Pippa Murphy’s sound design, interspersed by Oğuz Kaplangi’s music. Macbeth? Undone!
Macbeth (An Undoing) is at the Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh, until 25 February
