Elgin Cathedral, 20-23 June 2007

Richard Conlon and Community Cast in The Elgin Macbeth (photo - Fin Macrae).

HOW TO get the young to like Shakespeare. That’s the perennial challenge which theatre companies and educators struggle with. Some do it by radical updatings—Baz Luhrman’s Romeo+Juliet movie being a notable example.

Some, like a recent BBC series, jettison Shakespeare’s language and update his plots, which seems to me self-defeating. Macbeth, of course, is particularly open to such revisionism, having been written as a piece of political propaganda to please a paranoid king sitting on a newly acquired double throne.

In fact, a decade ago a Highland theatre company, Invisible Bouncers, abandoned Shakespeare altogether, and attempted to tell a more historically defensible version of Macbeth’s story, in a bilingual epic entitled An Gaisgeach/The Hero.

The Elgin Macbeth drew on elements of all of these to produce a potent theatrical mix in the truly exceptional setting of Elgin Cathedral. A National Theatre of Scotland production in association with Moray Council, Historic Scotland, and Highland 2007, this ambitious venture drew together a huge community and youth cast, with singers, musicians, and even the local ‘Parkour’ team (that’s free running—the kind of death-defying rooftop leaps that guy used to do on the BBC station ident).

Five professional actors took lead roles, with all the other parts played by members of the community cast, supported by a substantial children’s ‘chorus’ which carried echoes of the great Chorus of Refugees in Verdi’s operatic version of the play.

So, what did the Elgin Macbeth offer its sell-out audiences? The performance itself was a fast, energetic 80-minute roller-coaster with loads of impact. The Shakespeare text, largely unchanged but drastically shortened, was interleaved with elements of story telling, historical explanation, comedy and music, the whole complemented by a programme of installations in different corners of the Cathedral, compiled by pupils from a range of Moray High schools.

The costumes suggested a World War II war zone, but plain kilts, Celtic crosses and Burghead bulls fixed the location firmly in Scotland. And why the Elgin Macbeth? Because the real Macbeth (a good king) killed the real Duncan (who was young, not old, and not a good king) in a battle close by at Spynie.

As this was part of the NTS Learn programme, the community involvement was paramount. But there’s no point in presenting ‘community art’ to a wider audience unless it is, quite simply, good art. This certainly passed that test.

The large cast—both young and adult—was disciplined, committed and confident. Simon Sharkey’s and Chris Lee’s direction and Jeni Herbert’s choreography made the most of the opportunities for moving large numbers of people around swiftly within the resonant space of the Cathedral ruins.

Drawing the whole experience together, and acting as the audience’s link between past and present, myth and history, was the figure of the Porter, elevated from his walk-on status in the original, and played with an engaging cocky assurance by Robert Jack.

Richard Conlon and Anita Vettesse made a pair of Macbeths who, in the vivid intensity of their descent into madness and despair, would have graced many a conventional production. The decision to cast a professional actor as Macduff made for some strange decisions about cuts, with Banquo’s murder set offstage and no subsequent banquet scene, but with the inclusion instead of the probably spurious (and certainly badly written) murder of Macduff’s family.

This was a pity, as the member of the community cast who played Banquo brought an impressive presence to the role, as did many of his colleagues to all the smaller parts.

In some ways the sheer scale of the resources available to the NTS almost got in the way of the immediacy of the experience. An impressive panoply of lighting obscured the lines of the ruins, and yet made very little difference to the impact of a production being staged on the eve of Midsummer.

If it had started at 7pm rather than 8.30, then daylight would have been more than sufficient throughout and there would have been more visual continuity between actors and architecture. Similarly the distribution of radio mikes seemed rather haphazard (and they didn’t always work, thereby undercutting some key moments). But overall David Martin’s soundscape was highly evocative and delivered some effective shock moments.

On the first night there were many young people in the audience. Occasional giggles of embarrassment covered, I think a genuine engagement with and enthusiasm for the whole experience, and a respect for their peers who were giving their all ‘on stage’.

But there was also plenty for old Shakespeare hands to relish, with an approach to the text that drew out some intriguingly different emphases. The murder of Duncan—surely still one of the most psychologically intense scenes ever written—gained a chilling focus from the ancient setting, and the echoes of contemporary conflict zones were telling without being forced.

As someone said on the night, what is it with Moray and Shakespeare? This bold production follows on two highly successful visits in recent years by the Royal Shakespeare Company. The answer of course, is Nick Fearne and his arts team at Moray Council.

In a previous post Nick himself contributed a version of the Macbeth tale to the ongoing mix, and it was his initiative that brought in NTS to deliver the Elgin Macbeth. The result is yet another persuasive demonstration of how NTS is interpreting the term ‘National’ to mean much more than just a high profile for Scottish theatre on the international scene.

It was a week for promenade epics. From Elgin on Wednesday to Stornoway on Friday, to see Hiort/St Kilda: a European Opera. Leon McDermott is reviewing this extraordinary collaboration elsewhere in Northings, so I’ll just add my thought that here was another case of the technology getting in the way.

Truly astounding split-second coordination brought in live relays from St Kilda itself, together with filmed inserts, web-broadcasting, a live contemporary score, and dramatic action, all of which had to be precisely coordinated. Hugely impressive as all this was, I couldn’t help feeling that it obscured—rather than illuminated– the fact that this was really a very simple human story.

The ‘gee whizz’ element, for me, distanced the individual characters, and left a feeling more of admiration than empathy. And curiously, where The Elgin Macbeth sought to strip away the myths around Macbeth, Hiort was busily constructing new myths around the sad history of St Kilda, presenting audiences across Europe with a story of the island’s evacuation as it might have been, not as it was. Perhaps Shakespeare, arch-spinmeister, would have approved of the irony.

© Robert Livingston, 2007