MACBETH / play
Set in a war-torn, contemporary place, my take on Macbeth explores the sense of inevitability and racing pace that drive the play.
Drawing inspiration from current world events, I did my best to research contemporary war zones. The watches appear as a trio of displaced women, one SES worker experiencing the horrors of a war for the first time, a refugee with nothing but a blanket and a carrion bird, or rather a woman thriving on the chaos of the world around her. They all have experienced war differently, but are still very much displaced.
From the top of the piece, we feel the sense of inescapable doom pressing in on the Macbeths. With the murder of King Duncan, water from behind the wall starts to seep onto the stage, slowly filling the space. As the events begin to speed up and spiral out of Macbeth's control, the water rises more rapidly. The filling of the stage finally ceases with the death of Lady Macbeth. She is moved to lie against the back wall, just another body in an unending series of horrors.
With the death of Lady Macbeth, the last dregs of Macbeth's world begin to fall around him; the events coalesce with the large chandelier, which has hovered untouched over the stage, slowly being lowered into the waiting water below.
Hypothetical project taught by Bob Cousins
One of the earliest ideas I had was to set the play in the underworld, Macbeth is cursed to watch his counterparts, whom he has killed, enter into the space which he now inhabits. Water throughout the process was always resonated with me; it was a way to measure the passing of time, it holds memories, but it also created an interesting juxtaposition between Lady Macbeth's inability to clean herself of the blood while water is all around her.
What started as quite an organic space quickly became a geometric one.
I experimented with a number of ways to mark the passing of time and the way it speeds up throughout the play. I tried with the option of a bell, a dripping bucket, the passing of a light behind pillars...there were many options tried.
