PRESS RELEASE: Announcing War of the Worlds
22nd May 2025
By Alison Findlay, Professor of Renaissance Drama at Lancaster University and Chair of the British Shakespeare Association
Macbeth is the shortest of Shakespeare’s tragedies and yet the most unfathomable. This paradox is what makes the play so fascinating. In a mere 2,565 lines, its scope stretches across space, time and emotion: from the vast darkened ‘heavens’ (2.4.5) to the tiny ‘eye of newt and toe of frog’ (4.1.14); from the ‘instant’ of immediate action (1.5.56) to a future stretching out infinitely to the ‘crack of doom’ (4.1.116); from ‘royal hope’ (1.3.57) to the nihilistic despair that life is ‘full of sound and fury / Signifying nothing’ (5.5.26-8).
Macbeth was probably written in 1605-6 but the earliest printed text we have of it (which incorporates material by Middleton in Act 4 Scene 1), wasn’t published until 1623. Although Macbeth has a simple plot, making sense of its metaphysical and material dimensions in a performance – to say nothing of a GCSE course or exam answer – is challenging! imitating the dog provides two ingenious solutions.
You will be guided through the world of the play by a chorus of three actors who play the witches, wearing black kilts to recall the historical Scottish setting. In Shakespeare’s text, these figures are eccentric: strangers or outsiders. Banquo says they are ‘not like the inhabitants of the earth’ (1.3.42).
In this production they exist outside the fictional setting – a Japanese-influenced mafia world – and outside the performance, commenting wittily on what is going on from the present. Banquo also points out the mysterious figures are of indeterminate gender: ‘you should be women / And yet your beards forbid me to interpret / That you are so’ (1.46-7).
Such fluidity allows the witch-actors to play all the characters who surround Macbeth and Lady Macbeth as well. They create the contexts in which the tragic protagonists must perform. Shakespeare’s text never refers to them as ‘witches’ but as the ‘three weird sisters’ (2.1.20) – a name for the Fates or Destinies – suggesting their power to direct (perhaps even determine?) the action. You will also see them setting up scenes, moving cameras.
To imitate the dog, is to ‘break the bone and suck out the marrow’ of meaning, according to Francois Rabelais. This production, from imitating the dog, breaks the bone of the original play’s broad political contexts to focus on the marrow: the tragic love story of Macbeth and Lady M – who isn’t even given a name in the original text.
In Shakespeare’s play the Macbeths’ marriage is a classic case of folie á deux, the psychological condition where two people are drawn together through an act of a murder that neither could commit alone.
Lady Macbeth, the ‘fiend-like queen’ (5.7.99), is the engine that powers the murder while the experienced soldier Macbeth is the ‘butcher’ (5.7.99), the vehicle, who enacts it. Their interaction is decidedly erotic in nature. Lady Macbeth’s sexual teasing of her husband to be the same in action ‘As thou art in desire’ (1.7.40-1) excites Macbeth to ‘bend up / Each corporal agent to this terrible feat’ 1.7.79-80).
imitating the dog casts Macbeth and Lady M as very young protagonists – Macbeth as an orphan and Lady M as a victim of sexual exploitation. They are underdogs fired by their shared passion to outdo the mafia hierarchy in which they occupy the lowest rung.
Tragically, Macbeth and Lady Macbeth discover that they are consumed by the very structure they are trying to overturn. Assassinating Duncan seemed to be an absolute act but the spirit of absolute sovereignty, rampant individualism, is much harder to kill. Having murdered Duncan to become leader (Japanese “Oyabun”), Macbeth realises that ‘to be thus is nothing / But to be safely thus’ (3.2.48). There can be no rest in the endlessly competitive hierarchy built on violence. Refusing to tell Lady M, his ‘dearest partner of greatness’ (1.5.10) his plan to murder Banquo is a tragic mistake.
From Act 3 Scene 2 the couple are isolated individuals. As she sleepwalks, Lady M. asserts ‘None can call our power to account’ (5.1.35), that is, detect the murder, but she unconsciously recognizes that she cannot escape the system of ‘solely sovereign sway and masterdom’ (1.5.68) to which she is accountable. Whatever her ambitions were, or remain, they are always haunted by the spectre of Duncan whose power corrupts her from within like a damned spot.
Shakespeare’s play conveys these disturbing ideas with incredible economy through its combination of sound and spectacle. The spoken script’s intense poetry casts a spell over listeners. The weird sisters’ rhythmic chant is a sinister jingle on the paradoxes of corruption that run throughout the play: ‘Fair is foul and foul is fair / Hover through the fog and filthy air’.
The play’s visual effects, such as the appearance of Banquo’s ghost in Act 3, or the spectacular apparitions in Act 4, are perhaps even more impressive. Macduff says Duncan’s corpse will ‘destroy your sight / With a new Gorgon’ (2.3.66-7) – the mythological gorgon turned those who gazed on it to stone.
Spectators never see the corpse in Shakespeare’s play (this may have been too politically risky) but imitating the dog’s specialist use of screen and projection technologies magnifies the acts of graphic violence. Look out for fragmented images of the script itself, juxtaposed with car chases and grotesque animated caricatures that convey the savagery of the modern mafia setting. Look out too for ‘visual aids’ to the key revision tags vocalised by the weird chorus figures. This is not like any conventional power point!
Images of the protagonists, usually Macbeth and Lady M., are literally ‘captured’ by on-stage cameras and projected onto smaller screens, to give us access to their intimate conversations and private phone calls, just as the play does through soliloquies which express their thoughts and feelings as they occur.
The huge media screens make the overdetermined nature of the tragedy beautifully clear, daunting any individual endeavour from the live human figures on stage. Nevertheless, like Macbeth’s letters in the playscript, imitating the dog’s unique presentation techniques make us feel ‘transported’ beyond ‘the ignorant present’. We are encouraged to question, to ‘feel now / The future in the instant’ so that we can change it (2.1.54-6).
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