Macbeth in a Victorian context

But with Macbeth, you see I did Hamlet last year, and it was easy to set Hamlet in a modern context, because Hamlet is a modern head, a modern mind. Macbeth is more difficult. The problem with setting it in modern dress for me was how do you do scary witches in a modern dress? It’s pretty difficult.

And also there is something slightly nasty about Macbeth, something slightly third world if you like in a modern parlance or….so I went back to the Victorian era so that we were distant enough to have bad medicine, no anaesthetic, you know suppurating sores kind of thing, also it made available the idea of Florence Nightingale nurses who are meant on appearance to be nurturing, but we know that the witches are totally not nurturing, so it’s quite a strong image.

And the other reason is that it’s still modern enough for us to relate to it. It actually feels quite contemporary; we are still living out the decision made by the Victorians. In fact there are people….only late last century were people dying who could remember the Victorians, so it’s not that far away, and that’s why I chose that period, to make it both sort of accessible in a modern sense but still keep a slight distance.

I figured that if I was to dress everybody in sheepskins and give them swords, that would make the audience get off the hook too easily, and what I wanted to do, what I attempted to do with this production was not let the audience off the hook. To say this is a disturbing, scary, psychologically violent, as well as physically violent, brilliantly poetic play that does not let you off the hook.