Unravelling the Orthodoxies of the Shakespearian Classic

With all my work, I try to put women's experience front and centre. Certainly, when I was approaching this adaptation at first, I was approaching it with a view of Lady Macbeth. But then as I got into it, I realized that I wanted to work with all the female tracks, including Lady Macduff and the Witches as well. I think they all have a different backstory that can be explored.

Jan Gruca talks with Zinnie Harris, a British playwright, director and Associate Artistic Director of the Royal Lyceum Theatre Edinburgh, about her staging of "Macbeth (an undoing)", which premiered on 4th February 2023. The show went on a tour to New York and London in 2024 and came back to the Lyceum in May 2024.

Jan Gruca: Originally, the show was produced over a year ago, in early 2023. Could you tell me what made you decide it was the right time to stage Macbeth?

Zinnie Harris - I think that it is fair to say that my decision was a result of a decade and a half's worth of work for me. I have been rewriting and adapting classic plays from the perspective of female protagonists, who often are misunderstood or underwritten in the original. In a way, therefore, it was not so much the time to stage Macbeth as so much the time for me to take on the character of Lady Macbeth. I think also it chimes with a kind of interest in our culture of seeing stories from a different viewpoint, especially those such as Macbeth that everyone is familiar with. It was also around the time theatres were coming back to performing after the pandemic. In the Lyceum Theatre, we wanted to program and commission a big piece of traditional drama, as we felt this would be very much desired by our audiences, who for a long time had not been able to come and see live theatre. Macbeth without a doubt was a play that we felt would fulfil such needs.

Let me just quickly clarify this for our readers – you are not only a director of the show but also an associate artistic director of Lyceum Theatre. Does it mean you are also involved in the programming process?

- I am indeed, yes.

When it comes to your Macbeth (an undoing), you have built your dramaturgical idea around a theory that parts of the original play - focused on Lady Macbeth - are missing. Would you be keen to say something more about this for our readers?

- So I assumed that Lady Macbeth's character from the original script did not fully make sense. She feels and reads almost like a constructed character consisting of two versions of Lady Macbeth: the first version, which is found in the majority of the scenes, is this ambitious, very driven and cold-hearted woman pushing Macbeth into committing those atrocities. And then comes the second version that we see in her last scene from Shakespeare's original. All that inner strength, desperation and drive seems to have completely left and she is basically crumbling from guilt; she becomes a merely sleepwalking being. Shakespeare gives us very little understanding of what has happened between these two versions. In the upshot, that was my starting point: to try and write an adaptation that links these two Lady Macbeths.
I found it quite unbelievable how she transforms into that sleepwalking, lost woman from the steadfast intrigant, who manages to pull the weak, hallucinating Macbeth to the side and ask him 'Are you a man?'. It just felt to me that the trajectory for the character was entirely wrong. It seemed to me she had to grow in strength adequately to the increasing power she shared with Macbeth. That potentially was a sort of missing part of this story, which I wanted to explore.

What would you say might have been the reason for Shakespeare to develop her storyline in such a manner?

- We could suspect her development arc is missing because Shakespeare was simply not interested in writing that story. On the other hand, there is a school of thought that assumes there are missing sections of Macbeth anyway. Some scholars curiously point out that Macbeth is much shorter than the rest of his tragedies. They notice there are moments in the play where things are referenced out of the blue, for we have not seen nor heard about in the rest of the play at all, which might suggest it is only a surviving assemblage of the original text that is available to us today.

Do you have any examples of such moments off the top of your head?

- For instance, there is this scene in Act 1, where Lady Macbeth reveals they had children in the past. She says then that very famous quote 'I would have dashed the brains of my baby had I so sworn to do a deed as you have done to this.' We never have seen the scene, in which Macbeth swore that he would do it. Another example you could find in the second half, where there is a lot of reference to how much worse it was getting for Scotland with all the atrocities committed. Meanwhile, Banquo's death is the only example of the said atrocity that is dramatized for us, as Shakespeare really skirts over this topic. These are two clear examples that should give the viewers the right idea.

Let's talk a bit more about Lady Macbeth and other women. Your adaptation is centred on the female figures, while the men in a way happen to fill the landscape. I wonder if you intended to merely invert the Shakespearian gender dynamic, or do we deal here with a broader - perhaps metatheatrical – commentary?

- It is both, really. With all my work, I try to put women's experience front and centre. Certainly, when I was approaching this adaptation at first, I was approaching it with a view of Lady Macbeth. But then as I got into it, I realized that I wanted to work with all the female tracks, including Lady Macduff and the Witches as well. I think they all have a different backstory that can be explored. For instance, I was curious about how in the original text we meet Lady Macduff for the first time at the moment of her death. Naturally, there is this ongoing discourse in society about the portrayal of violence against women and making sure that when we see it on stage, screen or the pages of a book it is not merely gratuitous, but serves some other purpose, for instance, sparks some kind of a discussion about it.

Meanwhile, in "Macbeth", there is this somewhat challenging character that we only meet in order to see her destroyed. As a reaction to this, I felt that a contemporary audience would want to know more about Lady Macduff before she gets killed. As you had a chance to see, I started to invent a whole story and character arch for her with a special fixation on her relationship with Lady Macbeth. Then on the other hand we have the witches, which obviously do no longer relate to our contemporary circumstances, for we do not have a cultural concept of witches anymore. Yet, I felt that they could resonate with some contemporary marginalized groups of women, be it for economic, racial or even age-related reasons. Just like the witches, they are not necessarily listened to. I wanted to explore the idea of people who are pushed to the edge and have not got many opportunities to express who they are other than what they are perceived as. I suppose these were my feelings and interests when it comes to the female characters. At the same time, I would not say that the men are absent in Macbeth (an Undoing). I think they are there, and as much as we have a relationship between Lady Macbeth and Lady Macduff, there is also a parallel, significant relationship between Macbeth and Banquo. Just like Macbeth saw the invisible ghost of Banquo, so did Lady Macbeth see the ghost of Lady Macduff. Yet, since we follow my implication of assuming Lady Macbeth's viewpoint, we as the audience are only able to see what she sees; that is why we see a raving man, who 'talks to himself.' Only later in the play when she starts to be haunted by Lady Macduff we see the ghost. I think there are many interesting things offered by such a shifting of viewpoint.

In my understanding, the play finely balances between the characters' inner desires (i.e. lust for power) and a predeterministic nature of the supernatural embodied by the witches and their prophecies. There was one particular scene, in which Carlin was crossing the stage while gazing at Macbeth and entwining threads around her fingers. I felt this made a quite direct reference to the Moirai from Greek mythology. Could you share some thoughts about it?

- I do not think I kind of came down on either side of that. I think that my adaptation is almost in dialogue with the original play. And if there is a degree of supernatural, I link it to metatheatricality. It is almost as if the original play is forcing the action in a particular way and gaslighting Lady Macbeth into thinking she is mad. Thus, when blood starts to appear on her dress, I am not necessarily saying that I believe in the supernatural so much as I believe in the power of the original script to channel her into madness. That is why at some point we deconstruct the theatricality of the show and the actress (Nicole Cooper) steps out of the character, calls the stage assistant, turns the lights on and indicates she knows something is not going the way it was supposed to be.

You have decided to stage a play in a contemporary setup - were there any contemporary socio-political contexts you were curious about while writing your adaptation? Now, in 2024 we found ourselves in a quite unstable political situation which Scotland has not seen in a long while, which seems to resonate with the circumstances in the play.

- I see you are referring to the current shuffles in the cabinet, but that was not particularly the case when I was working on this adaptation. Nonetheless, when you work on works such as Macbeth, you are in a way dramatizing trends that are present in almost every era; even in peacetime, we see people behaving like tyrants. Whether it is on the grand political stage or the local one, you always see people who are led by ambition and find their downfall because they are kind of ruthless and unguarded about how they might act in relation to morality. So I do not think you need to talk about any one specific moment for it to have resonance. Obviously, Shakespeare is so good at this. I was rereading Julius Caesar recently and thinking that you could be talking about Trump, Johnson or many other people. This is made possible because undoubtedly Shakespeare offers an impressive understanding of the human psyche. In a way, he defines what it is to be a human.
I would say the adaptation offers a general commentary on power; how one can get it, followed by desperate attempts to hold it for as long as possible. In the background there of course is this big theme of ambition and preparedness to cross a line, when you really should not.

I see. Perhaps in this question, my Polish theatrical customs came to the surface, because we tend to stage Macbeth in a particularly political manner; in a sense, most of the stagings majorly comment on the current political situation or a sense of discord or even hostility within the society.

- I think that is because we deal here with quite a specific adaptation, but otherwise, I see your point. If you were a director putting on a fairly conventional Macbeth, you would be thinking: why am I doing this now?

But this is Macbeth (an undoing). This is actually about the examination of the orthodoxy of the original playtext. One of the orthodoxies is that we have a character, a woman, who's probably the most well-known female character in the Western canon, Lady Macbeth, and yet her journey does not make sense. My question is: why have we been prepared to accept that? Could it be because we do not like the idea of a woman who is driven, ambitious, ruthless, and dangerous, unless we get to the second half of the story where she actually crumbles under the weight of her own guilt? It is possibly the second half of the original play that lets us cope with the discomfort of the first, which I feel is misogynistic at its core. If we revisit this with what we now know about psychology, attachment theory of interrelational trauma, men and women, and gender politics, would we actually come up with this character? Would we draw this character like that? Or would we say: hang on a minute, something seems to be missing.

Finally, I would like to quickly touch upon the technical aspects of adapting Shakespeare in English. What do you find challenging? How do you seek the balance between his version of English and your own, more contemporary dialogues?

- It is a very interesting question I always have in mind when I start working on such adaptation. And it usually is one that takes a lot of time before you find an answer to it, especially when you know that there will be quite a lot of contemporary material. I have previously worked on a number of adaptations, including John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi. When I worked on that, I managed to find a place, where it felt suiting to drop the poeticism of the original and raise my own language so that they could meet in the middle. When I started working on Macbeth, I tried to follow a similar assumption, but actually, when it came to it, it was not really possible to do that because of the structure of Shakespeare's language – the structure, iambic pentameter and so on. This Shakespearian construction is particularly tight and very rigid, so it is somewhat challenging to efficiently drop it. Unlike The Duchess of Malfi, Shakespeare's work is widely known, as I have earlier indicated. Thanks to this, I pretty soon realized that, if I was using sections of Shakespeare, they had to exist as Shakespeare in lines, which meant that I had to find a way that my contemporary language would weave in and out of it, rather than drop it at a convenient point.
I suppose there were lots of different ways I led the audience into being comfortable with that. One of the things I particularly did not want to happen was that the audience would feel as if I was suddenly changing the gears between one another. One such way was my employment of Carlin, who in the prologue signalled to the audience that I was going to be talking about the traditional, but I am going to be talking about it in a contemporary language. She functions as some kind of a link to all the Shakespeare versions of Macbeth that there have ever been – for she knows them all by heart, as she says – yet emphasizes that the audience can expect some playfulness in the language itself. This prologue is followed by the scene with the Bloody Soldier; he comes in and tries to speak in his classical, elevated language yet she ostensibly interrupts. Then we go actually into a section with Macbeth and Banquo, which is fairly Shakespearian. Then I anchor the audience further into this by the next scene, in which Macbeth sees Lady Macbeth for the very first time in the play, and nearly all of it is essentially classical in language until one major 'glitch', as I am used to calling it, happens. the supernatural is useful. Lady Macbeth suddenly sees a ladybird on Macbeth's shirt in the middle of Scottish winter. It is kind of a supernatural, element that suddenly brings the contemporary again – my assumption was the audience would not even realise that. So I would say that we keep breaking the 'classical' with glitches and cracks as such, yet we never fully depart from the traditional Shakespeare. I wanted to make it clear to the audience that they can expect the 'true' Shakespeare, but I am going to interrupt and repurpose it along the way.

Well, I am not a native speaker, but for me, this certainly worked. I sometimes had difficulties distinguishing the two languages really, because the contemporary bits maintained the natural, Shakespearian flow and rhythm. Nonetheless, I would like to know if you have any plans for the next productions, that you would be able to share with us.

- Sadly, I cannot go too much into detail since nothing has been officially announced yet. I can tell you that I am definitely interested in further adaptations of Shakespeare because I thoroughly enjoy working with him. I might write something of my own again soon, as I try to maintain the balance between adaptations and original works. I am doing a lot of research at the moment, but it is too early to say anything with certainty.
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Zinnie Harris – a British playwright, theatre director and screenwriter. She graduated in zoology at the University of Oxford and directing at Hull University. She received multiple playwriting and directing awards, including the 1999 Peggy Ramsay Award, John Whiting Award, Arts Foundation Fellowship Award and several Fringe First Awards. Her writing credits include "This Restless House", "Meet Me at Dawn", "How to Hold Your Breath, Nightingale and Chase", "The Wheel, Julie". Her theatre directing credits include "Gut", "The Scent of Roses", "The Duchess (of Malfi)", "Rhinoceros", "Christmas Tales" and many others.
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Polish version

Jan Gruca
Dziennik Teatralny Glasgow
27 maja 2024