ZINNIE Harris is one of Scotland’s most accomplished playwrights.
In addition to her own original plays (such as the magnificent Further Than The Furthest Thing), the dramatist has a deservedly excellent reputation as an exciting and imaginative adapter of theatrical classics (including This Restless House, her celebrated version of The Oresteia by Aeschylus).
Glad to report that, in turning her attention to Shakespeare’s “Scottish play”, Harris has created another astonishing adaptation.
In truth, resetting the play to the war-torn early-20th century is not, in itself, a particularly revolutionary innovation.
Nor, indeed, is the production’s self-conscious metatheatricality.
As a tone-setting opener, the witch-cum-narrator Carlin (the fabulously sardonic Liz Kettle) bursts through the fourth wall, Pirandello-style, to assail the audience as “ghouls” who are in search of death as entertainment.
Tom Piper’s sparse, Brechtian design (“I have a chair”, Carlin complains) is in a similar vein. Effective and compelling though these choices are, they are borrowed from an established theatrical heritage (“and”, as the late film critic Barry Norman might have asked, “why not?”).
If it’s something new you’re looking for, however, you will find it in Harris’s boldly and brilliantly reimagined script. To divulge the playwright’s narrative innovations in spoiling detail would be a crime worthy of being hunted down by a vengeful, sword-wielding Macduff.
Suffice it to say that the dramatist has moved some of the bard’s important sub-plot lines so substantially that the entire geography of the play is altered, like the redirecting of tributaries might ultimately change the direction of a major river. Many of Harris’s changes centre on the character of Lady Macbeth.
This is an unapologetically feminist retelling of the great story, achieved in a manner that convinces utterly while eschewing polemic.
Harris does not neglect the pivotal importance in the play of sexual persuasion: Lady M’s insistence: “When you durst do it, then you were a man. And to be more than what you were, you would be so much more the man”, supersedes the witches’ prophecy as the driver of Macbeth’s regicide.
However – from the imagining of sisterly relations between Lady Macbeth and Lady Macduff to the emphasis placed on the usurping queen’s loss of no fewer than five children in infancy, this adaptation places a powerful emphasis on female experience.
Such a brave reframing of the famous play places a premium on the casting of the role of Lady Macbeth.
Fortunately, Harris (who also directs) has, in the magnificent Nicole Cooper, the perfect actor for the radically re-envisaged character.
Cooper has impressed for many a year at the often superb (but always insufficiently funded) Bard in the Botanics festival in Glasgow, and she plays the elevated queen here with resounding emotional depth, wonderfully sarcastic humour and terrifying ruthlessness.
Opposite her, Adam Best performs a remarkable high-wire act as a Macbeth who is both Shakespeare’s homicidal maniac and Harris’s psychologically receding king.
Best shines amidst a universally impressive cast and in a new version of the great tragedy that bristles with intelligence and theatrical flair.
Macbeth: An Undoing runs until Saturday, February 25: lyceum.org.uk
