Car Park, Eden Court Theatre, Inverness, 19 October 2009

OUTDOOR events in Scotland are always a hostage to fortune, and the early weather indications were not promising for the visit of Poland’s Teatr Biuro Podrozy to Eden Court. Happily the rain held off on what turned out a mild evening, and the light mist added further atmosphere but no obstruction to a striking production.

Macbeth - Teatr Biuro Podrozy Company

The Poznan-based company have earned an international reputation for a style of theatre based on outdoor locations, an emphasis on imagery rather than text, and a very physical approach to the visual action, including motorcycles and performers on stilts.

That approach was partly a response to the state censorship that prevailed in Communist Poland when the company was first formed in 1988. Their name translates as “Travel Agency Theatre”, one they adopted as a response to the difficulties of travel in Communist Poland – they offered instead the possibility of travelling in the imagination.

All of those elements were entirely obvious in this version of Shakespeare’s Scottish play. My fear that the play might have been lost in the adaptation was not entirely borne out – certainly, with most of the text gone, it cannot be regarded as a canonical version of Shakespeare’s play, but the structure, themes and characters were clearly drawn from the Macbeth we know.

Director Pawel Szkotak and his company admittedly then made their own creation of it, with little regard for textual accuracy. Their skeleton Macbeth was boldly re-imagined in high-impact fashion, full of allusions to modern warfare, from World War II through to the current conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, but without being too specific on any of these referents.

The result was a play that felt simultaneously ancient and contemporary. The imagery that largely (but not completely) took the place of Shakespeare’s language was cleverly sustained through the piece, and included the trappings of authoritarian militarism, the veiled witches (another echo of Iraq), the football-style rattles, and the charred tree trunks which fell one by one as Macbeth’s victims were dispatched, and also pre-figured the Birnam wood finale.

Their confidence that they would be able to communicate through imagery and physical theatre rather than relying on text proved justified. The show ran at a relentess pace for around 75 minutes, another indication of the compression of the original. A soprano added haunting song to the sparingly used spoken word that was retained, and the whole thing had an exhilarating energy and pace that proved compelling.

© Kenny Mathieson, 2009

Links

• Teatr Biuro Podrozy