There are so many odd things going on in Macbeth (An Undoing), that even veterans of Shakespeare’s Macbeth could well be wandering home after the show scratching their heads in puzzlement.
Yet the additional scenes and modifications to the text have the potentially thought-provoking effect of highlighting the position of women characters.
The play mostly focuses on Lady Macbeth (Nicole Cooper). Living with her is Emmanuella Cole as Lady Isabel Macduff who is heavily pregnant, possibly to Banquo (James Robinson). Lady Macbeth sometimes calls her sister and at other times cousin.
The play opens with Liz Kettle as Carlin, one of the three local women at times referred to as witches, addressing the audience directly. She calls us “misery seekers” and “blood-seeking vermin”, claiming that “death is what you want.”
She even throws into her monologue the thought that, “you can tell the health of the theatre by what’s on the stage,” which is a fair point, though I wasn’t sure what that had to do with the play.
At times, the show can seem like a confused unfunny satire, or perhaps an attempt to conjure up the mind of a mad character.
There are plenty of candidates for the label of madness. Macbeth himself stays in bed not sleeping for ninety days while his wife runs the country, despite her difficulties in getting the courtiers to recognise her as a woman. They insist on calling her Sir and Your Highness.
Course, she might be imagining it all. After all, she keeps hearing knocking and birds flying above her. Macbeth even tells her that “they” want to burn her as a witch, though given this version of the play is set in Scotland sometime in the last hundred years when I think they gave up burning witches, that outcome seems unlikely.
Nevertheless, for some unidentified reason, they do put her in a straitjacket and mouthguard for a while, but allow her out long enough for her to stab someone.
It’s not that she is antisocial. Early on, she seems the life and soul of the party they hold for Duncan (Marc Mackinnon), a very jovial King arriving with his son Malcolm (Star Penders), who seems more interested in playing with his table tennis bat and ball.
As usual in Macbeth, there are lots of characters getting killed, though they do keep popping back to grin with bloodied bodies at Lady Macbeth. However, what she is more concerned about is the blood that keeps appearing on her hands and dress. It does mean she is forever changing her dress on stage.
A fine cast gives good performances against a set consisting of layers of black standing mirrors. The show has moments that grab our attention, but the additions and changes to Shakespeare's text tend to confuse the meaning and dilute the dramatic tension.
There are exciting and imaginative ways of modifying a Shakespeare text. Unfortunately, Macbeth (An Undoing) is not one of them.