The Macbeths

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JOYCE MCMILLAN on THE MACBETHS at Dundee Rep, for The Scotsman 6.10.18.
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4 stars ****

WHEN LUCIANNE MCEVOY took the Traverse stage by storm as the furious young Northern Irish playwright Ruth, in this year’s festival smash-hit Ulster American – or appeared there this spring, as the desperately anxious young mother in Frances Poet’s Gut – few in the audience might have imagined that their next chance to see her would be in the role of one of Shakespeare’s great tragic heroes, Macbeth.

In 2018, though, the tide of cross-gender casting is sweeping through the Shakespeare canon, celebrated in shows like the current joyous Seventies-style Twelfth Night at the Lyceum; and in creating this touring revival of his acclaimed 70-minute nightmare version of Macbeth, first seen at the Citizens’ last year in a breathtakingly intense studio performance by Keith Fleming and Charlene Boyd, Dominic Hill has decided to transform the Macbeths into a female couple, with Boyd reprising her award-nominated performance as young, beautiful, ambitious yet strangely naive Lady Macbeth, and McEvoy stepping into the role of the warrior leader whose fatal act of ambition finally takes her life.

Set entirely around the Macbeths increasingly bloodstained bed, this brief, taut and unforgettably vivid version of the play, adapted by Hill and Frances Poet, focusses brilliantly on the nightmarish world of moral darkness conjured up in the Macbeths’ great soliloquies; so that although much of the play is cut, we miss almost none of its most memorable moments. Beneath the bed are four drawers containing, like mementoes, the objects that link the Macbeths to the world beyond their room; the tiny clothes of their lost child, the surveillance tapes recording the growing horror of Macbeth’s rule, and one drawer full of dark, clotted blood.

And if the relationship between the couple on the bed lacks some of the animal ferocity of the union between Fleming’s big, testosterone-charged Macbeth and Boyd’s sensual lady, McEvoy’s performance – still a little tentative both physically and vocally – is already brilliant in capturing the intensity of Macbeth’s imaginative inner life, and his or her deep vulnerability to it. It’s not clear, at this stage, whether much is gained by the occasional adaptation of the text to suggest that Macbeth is a woman, rather a man played by a woman. What is clear, though, is that McEvoy is a superb actor, with much to bring to one of Shakespeare’s great tragic roles; and that Boyd’s performance in this extraordinary adaptation has lost none of its rich, knife-edge glamour, as the Citizens’ company – currently in exile from its Glasgow home – sets off on tour across Scotland.

Paisley Arts Centre tonight and on tour until 27 October, including the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, 16-20 October.

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