Dr Peter Kirwan

Tag: Macbeth

  • The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged) [Revised] (Again) (American Shakespeare Center) @ The Blackfriars Playhouse

    The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged) [Revised] (Again) (American Shakespeare Center) @ The Blackfriars Playhouse

    Every now and again, I’ve been lucky to see a revival of an existing play that makes that play feel freshly written, as if designed for that company and that moment. The reworking of Death of a Salesman for an African American family; Theatre Wallay’s reworking of The Taming of the Shrew as a commentary…

  • Macbeth (Treehouse Shakespeare Ensemble) @ The Wharf Loft

    Macbeth (Treehouse Shakespeare Ensemble) @ The Wharf Loft

    ‘The night has been unruly’ remarked Lennox (Madison Rudolph); ‘’Twas a rough night’ agreed Macbeth (Kailey Potter). The lines resonated as an audience huddled together in the loft space of The Wharf; the planned outdoor opening of Treehouse Ensemble’s Macbeth in the garden of Rose Terrace had been scrapped as the rainstorms swept inland by…

  • The Tragedy of Macbeth (film)

    The Tragedy of Macbeth (film)

    Films of Macbeth have a fraught relationship with space. It’s a play whose own spaces – psychic, architectural, geographic, emotional, supernatural – are particularly fluid, and whose tautness paradoxically combines abstraction with the impression of nuanced interiority. To capture the play’s juxtapositions within the conventions of mainstream screen naturalism isn’t an easy task, and thus most films…

  • Macbeth @ The Almeida (live-stream)

    Macbeth @ The Almeida (live-stream)

    As chamber-piece Macbeths go, perhaps the most iconic remains Trevor Nunn’s RSC production at The Other Place, filmed for television in one of the starkest, barest of all Shakespeare films. The Almeida’s new production, directed by Yaël Farber, aimed at times for a similar effect, with the production’s live broadcast director translating the intimacy of the Almeida into…

  • The Tragedy of Macbeth @ Tang Shu-wing Theatre Studio (archival recording)

    The Tragedy of Macbeth @ Tang Shu-wing Theatre Studio (archival recording)

    The opening of Tang Shu-Wing’s The Tragedy of Macbeth (recorded in 2019, and made available to World Shakespeare Congress delegates) announces the arrival of a modern couple in a dream world, through which they will navigate the world of Macbeth in the guise of that play’s two protagonists. The dream framing is never given more explanation, but provides an almost hallucinatory…

  • Macbeth: A Conjuring (Shakespeare’s Globe) (film)

    Macbeth: A Conjuring (Shakespeare’s Globe) (film)

    Macbeth: A Conjuring is a welcome anomaly in the era of streamed and socially distanced theatre. For Bonfire Night 2020, as part of its ‘Shakespeare and Fear’ festival, the Globe reunited the cast of its 2018 Macbeth (reviewed on The Bardathon here) to offer a socially distanced, partially staged reading of the play. It’s a great use of…

  • Macbeth (Big Telly/Creation) via Zoom

    Macbeth (Big Telly/Creation) via Zoom

    Macbeth’s uncanniness, its waywardness (to take the word that Scott Newstok and Ayanna Thompson’s important book privileges), is central to its blurring of boundaries, its confusion between what is real and what is not. Zoom offers an ideal medium to explore this uncanniness. Big Telly’s production, broadcast in collaboration with Creation Theatre, exploited all the…

  • Macbeth @ The Berliner Ensemble (archival recording)

    Macbeth @ The Berliner Ensemble (archival recording)

    Michael Thalheimer’s 2018 production of Macbeth, as preserved in the Berliner Ensemble’s stream for its ‘BE At home’ programme during the Covid-19 lockdown, is immersed in corporeality. This is not a production in which bodies are aestheticised, but one in which they excrete, expel, merge and bloat. Macbeth (Sascha Nathan) describes himself as Duncan’s butcher, and that’s…

  • Macbeth (Playing Shakespeare with Deutsches Bank) @ Shakespeare’s Globe (archival recording)

    Macbeth (Playing Shakespeare with Deutsches Bank) @ Shakespeare’s Globe (archival recording)

    At a taut ninety minutes, the Playing Shakespeare production of Macbeth staged at Shakespeare’s Globe in early 2020 – just before the pandemic shut down theatres – converts well into a pacey film that preserves the raw energy of a production performed to thousands of schoolchildren (always a reliably vocal audience, especially at the Globe) while offering some rare…

  • Macbeth (Queen’s Theatre Hornchurch/Derby Theatre) @ Derby Theatre

    Macbeth (Queen’s Theatre Hornchurch/Derby Theatre) @ Derby Theatre

    It can seem like faint praise to focus on a production’s lighting, but Derby Theatre’s new Macbeth was truly extraordinarily well lit. Daniella Beattie’s simple designs created a world of shadow and fear, in combination with Ruari Murchison’s set. For much of the production, a deep stage heavily front-lit created an upstage area that was a void of black, into and…