This radical reimagining of Shakespeare’s Scottish play is set in a psychiatric unit, focusing on a solitary patient who is channeling the story of Macbeth.
CCTV cameras capture the patient’s every move as he is inhabited in turn by each of the characters and the clinical tiled walls of the unit come to life in a visually stunning multi-media theatrical experience, where nothing is as it seems. Read more …
Multi award-winning actor Alan Cumming returns to Glasgow for a virtuoso performance in this bold re-imagining of Shakespeare’s chilling tale of desire, ambition, and the supernatural.
John Tiffany and Alan Cumming (who made his stage debut as Malcolm in Macbeth in 1985) originally worked together on the National Theatre of Scotland’s production of Euripides’ The Bacchae which took the Edinburgh International Festival by storm in 2007 and subsequently toured in 2008 to Aberdeen, Inverness and the Lincoln Center Festival in New York. Andy Goldberg runs the Shakespeare Gym in New York City and was staff director on the National Theatre of Scotland’s production of Black Watch in New York, when he and John Tiffany first started collaborating creatively.
Cumming’s grasp of the poetry is so complete, and his raw emotional immersion in it so total, that the audience remains absolutely gripped by the narrative; and unable to resist the sense of being pulled by the story towards the very brink of hell.
If you can accept its terms, it becomes an intriguing expression of the unknowable mystery of an individual experience of existence. If you cannot – you leave.
The seemingly impossible has been made possible in this landmark Scottish production.
Painted like this, the play is a vision of one man's helpless descent into madness and suicidal despair. No production since Anthony Neilson's The Wonderful World of Dissocia has so distressingly captured the inescapable hold of mental illness.
Deserving of its standing ovation on opening night.
We don't want to take anything away from what is an impressive performance from Cumming as he works his way through all the main players in what is more-or-less a one-man version of Shakespeare's tale. It's an immense challenge for any actor and he handles it remarkably well, but as a concept it absolutely killed the play stone dead for us.
First and foremost, a stunning testament to Alan Cumming's virtuosity.
With Cumming at its centre, the heady tangle of strength and vulnerability he presents us with makes for a brilliantly troubling play for twisted times.
It was disturbing and moving and thoroughly deserved its whooping standing ovation.
For all its virtues, though, and for all that it plays on a more personal scale than full blooded Shakespearean tragedy, I’m not sure the whole sheds quite as many fresh insights into the play as the ambition of the project promised.
This is an intriguing, important production that opens up the play in new and exciting ways and deserves live transmission.
Cumming is stunning, by turns commanding, fragile, grotesque, and in the role of the tyrant king, finding a disarming balance of vulnerability and menace.
The pairing of Tiffany and Cumming has become a work of psychological alchemy. All hail Alan Cumming that shalt be King of the National Theatre of Scotland hereafter.
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Photographer Credit: Manuel HarlanTramway, Glasgow from Wednesday June 13, 2012, until Saturday June 30, 2012. More info: www.tramway.org
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