15 October – 18 January 2018-19, Royal Shakespeare Company (Royal Shakespeare Theatre/Barbican)
Creative Team
Direction: Polly Findlay
Designer: Fly Davis
Dramaturgy: Zoë Svendsen
Lighting: Lizzie Powell
Music: Ruppert Cross
Sound: Christopher Shutt
Movement: Aline David
Fights: Kate Waters
Illusions: Chris Fisher
Cast: David Acton, Afolabi Alli, Donna Banya, Stevie Basaula, Edward Bennett, Katy Brittain, Raif Clarke, Niamh Cusack, Paul Dodds, Christopher Eccleston, Josh Finan, Bally gill, Mariam Haque, Michael Hodgson, John Macaulay, Luke Newberry, Tom Padley, Tim Samuels, Raphael Sowole.
Production photographs: Richard Davenport
What if the horror comes from within? A key dramaturgical ‘find’ that unlocked the creative work on this production was realising that Macbeth, when he shouts for Seyton in his last, isolated fight for supremacy, is doing the equivalent of conjuring Satan. He calls for him 3 times in one speech – and suddenly Seyton/Satan is there. Not otherwise a key character, he seems to have uncanny knowledge of Lady Macbeth’s death. Scholars preparing editions of the text often add in a stage direction that he exits before returning with this news, seeking an empirical logic to the scene. Instead we took Seyton/Satan’s strange awareness as an invitation to imagine a new figure, hidden in plain sight, a kind of janitor, who hovered at the back of the stage – apparently merely a bit player/a servant in the household. The figure appeared, as well as the 3rd murderer – the one Macbeth sends extra, to check up on the two he has already commissioned. As the time ticked down to Macbeth’s death, this janitor-Satan notched up on the wall, in chalk, the increasing number of deaths for which Macbeth is responsible. For it seems important, given the cultural history of the production positioning Macbeth as a fatally flawed but fascinating hero, that we should remember that he is also a serial killer – and murderer of children. The tragedy is not Macbeth’s to own, but plays out largely out of sight, caused by Macbeth.
