CityLife

Macbeth at the Royal Exchange - but where's the witchcraft?

Nicholas Gleaves as macbeth at the Royal Exchange

OLDHAM-born actor, director and playwright Matthew Dunster launches the new season at the Royal Exchange with a strikingly contemporary take on Shakespeare’s tragedy Macbeth. 

Matthew was most recently at the Exchange to direct his own play, You Can See The Hills, in The Studio.

The production won a M.E.N. Best Studio Actor Award for its solo performer Will Ash and also had a sell-out transfer run at London’s Young Vic. 

Macbeth is, of course, widely regarded as one of the great plays and theatrical history is littered with famously extraordinary, or disastrous, productions. So it’s not, I put to Matthew, a play any director undertakes lightly.

Populist, contemporary way

 “I probably did, actually,” he replies, confoundingly. “I was asked to do it and I said I’d love to do it, just because I wanted to have a go at it. I wanted to have a go at it in a very populist, contemporary, theatrical way.

“I was kind of glad it was Macbeth because I know it well, because I played it at college. In fact, I think it’s one we all know well. Even if you don’t know it inside out, you know what it’s about and that’s not something you could say about all Shakespeare’s plays.

“I’m directing Troilus and Cressida later this year at The Globe and I asked to do that simply because I had never even read it!

''With Shakespeare, you come into each one with so many echoes of previous productions and one of the problems with Macbeth is that people do tend to come at it with this heavy weight and one of my bugbears with Shakespeare is it carries so much intellectual baggage with it.

Pair of garden shears

''I thought, ‘ I just want to make a really good show’ “I’ve taken not scissors but a big pair of garden shears to it!,” he laughs.

“It’s not actually that long, so I’ve not made cuts for that reason. But you have to decide what it is you want to do with it. I remember many years ago I’d just graduated and I was at one of these events where they send ‘aspiring artists’.

“I was chatting to this Bulgarian guy, who was the same age as me but  I found intimidating just because he was Eastern European.

"Like all young writers do, I talked about how I wanted to ‘collaborate’, which basically meant I wanted a designer or whoever to get me out of trouble. 

Rid of all the witchcraft

"He said, very earnestly, he wasn’t trying to be funny ‘I love collaborating. My favourite three collaborators are Chekhov, Beckett and Shakespeare.’

"I remember thinking ‘that’s brilliant!’, So what I’ve decided to do and what I’ve said to the cast is ‘let’s collaborate with him’.

''Where we think he would benefit from our contemporary eyes saying ‘we don’t need that, that’s no use to us’, we’ve just got rid of it.

''So what we’ve really got rid of is all the witchcraft. I don’t even think Shakespeare wrote those spells.

“But we’ve replaced those ‘weird sisters’ with the idea that they are victims of conflict and we observe them very much in the way we might observe iconic images of children who’ve been brutalised by war.”

Macbeth is at The Royal Exchange until Saturday, April 11. Call 0161 833 9833.