Shakespeare dominates UK theatre, both in sheer number of productions and the definition of what a play ought to be (script-driven, poetic, plot-centric). Even young authors need to test themselves against the Bard. And Macbeth, possibly because it is set north of the Border, is the natural choice for Scotland.
Like I don't understand why a company who do physical theatre won't put themselves in the right part of the Fringe brochure, I don't get why Macbeth is hip. It is ubiquitous and any company putting it on is doing to get lost in the rush - especially when TR Warszawa are staging an epic version, with live explosions, out at the Royal Highland Centre.
Perhaps unfortunately, their 2008: Macbeth manages, between the action scenes and spectacular set - it's a stand alone building divided into four separate stages that switches between being a home, a castle, a war zone and a helicopter landing pad - to embody every concern I have about the modern versions of Macbeth. Updating the story to contemporary warfare through costume and adapting the script strives to make Macbeth relevant - the civil conflicts in Europe or the business in the Middle East are obvious references - but it makes a nonsense of Macbeth's preoccupation with lineage: military commanders don't get to pass their position on to their children. Besides, Macbeth witters on about seeing a dagger, before getting handy with semi-automatic weaponry.
2008 Macbeth is undeniably spectacular: the actors aim for a self-consciously high tone whenever they are given a soliloquy, and even in surtitles, Shakespeare's lyrical flights of philosophy are incisive and moving. Yet it's ultimately disappointing that the gap between the original play and the modern situations of conflict that this version wants to discuss is too large, and the gestures towards Islamic otherness is impossible to develop from a script that partially comes from a very Christian paranoia about pagan .
Down in the quad, another Polish take on Macbeth has the witches on stilts and explodes the core story into sheer mayhem and excitement, but my concern is that trying to adopt Macbeth as a political story does little justice to the core text. If the character development of Lady Macbeth is uncertain - her madness seems unexplained and sudden, although maybe that's Shakespeare being ambiguous rather than lazy - the essential tragedy revolves about how Macbeth ends up being punished for upsetting the established order through murder. A modern assassination might be shocking and criminal, but it lacks the seriousness of regicide, which - at least when James I (formerly James VI of Scotland) was taking power at the time of Macbeth's writing - has associations of blasphemy.
The familiarity of the script denies any possibility of surprise. Macbeth is going to kill a king, some kids, then get killed. When Shakespeare wrote it, he took such liberties with the source material that the finale might not have been certain. Now, I watch and wait to see what each director has done with the iconic scenes. How drunk and lecherous is the Night Porter? What about the banquet? The final confrontation. At this point, being a critic is like being a sports commentator (a more worthy job, perhaps, but not my interest).
It's probably something to do with Scotland claiming back its identity from Britishness. It might be that the thing is short and has a rare good female role. The weird bits round the edges - the witches, the ghosts - are fun. But it is not amenable to contemporary interpretations, and unless George Bush gets cast as the Big Man, I'm out for Macbeth.
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