Sequel takes a second stab at Lady Macbeth

Published on Saturday 6 February 2010 19:34

LADY Macbeth lives on, a defiant leader of her Scottish kinfolk, while an English general tries to establish the new King Malcolm on an uneasy throne.

Welcome to the sequel of Shakespeare's Macbeth, more than 400 years after the original was written.

Penned by one of Scotland's best-known playwrights and starring one of Scotland's leading ladies, the sequel opens this week in the unlikely setting of a north London theatre.

David Greig's Dunsinane – the Perthshire site of the defining battle in the play – is the story of young soldiers struggling to impose their authority on an unruly country after deposing a foreign "tyrant". It has powerful contemporary parallels with the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

At Greig's request, the Royal Shakespeare Company specifically sought young actors to play teenage soldiers in the Dunsinane garrison, facing a hostile and very foreign culture where they expected to be welcomed as liberators.

But it is primarily a ripping yarn with dramatic battle scenes, he pledges, where English troops wielding broadswords clash with Scots with double-headed axes.

The dangerous and passionate Lady Macbeth lives on after her husband's killing, as she did in history, and is played by Siobhan Redmond – Scottish ambassador of stage and screen, from The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie to The High Life.

"There's a lot of blood and it has got sex too," he promises. "You can't have Lady Macbeth in a play without a little bit of seduction action."

Macbeth was the first theatre production Greig ever saw, on the stage of Edinburgh's Royal Lyceum, when he returned to the capital after his early childhood in Nigeria.

In recent years he had begun to wonder more and more what happened after the curtain fell.

Nervously, Greig is waiting for the curtain to go up on the RSC production. For all the play's promise, the reviewers have yet to deliver a verdict.

He is well aware of all the theatrical superstitions surrounding "the Scottish play", said to bring disaster if its name is said during a staging. "I feel I am already playing dice with the theatre gods, " he says.

Greig describes Dunsinane as a "cheeky" sequel written in rich, but modern, language. "I make no pretence to be as good as the original. It is genuinely a play that posits the question what happens after the end of Macbeth."

Greig is the writing adviser for the National Theatre of Scotland, where his forthcoming work includes a new production of JM Barrie's Peter Pan, and two other new plays. He is a multi-award winning writer of works such as When The Bulbul Stopped Singing and Pyrenees, and has also worked and researched widely in the Middle East.

With Redmond, the Black Watch actor Brian Ferguson, and another leading Scottish actor, Ewan Stewart, in the cast, it may be a surprise to see Dunsinane open in the 300-seat Hampstead Theatre in London. But Greig and the NTS hope that, if the play is a success, it will be performed in Scotland.

Shakespeare's Macbeth ends with the Scottish king slain after a brief and bloody reign, and Lady Macbeth also dead, apparently by her own hand. King Malcolm hails the end of the "dead butcher and his fiend-like queen".

Macbeth's reign ran for 15-20 years, during an era, Greig notes, when Scottish kings often survived just a few months: "Whether he was a tyrant or not, we don't know, but the one thing we can be sure of he was an extremely effective king."

Gruach, the real name of his queen, lived on after his death.

A central premise of Greig's play is the discovery by the English forces supporting Malcolm that they have misjudged the popular reaction to their presence and to the tyrant's death.

Greig says many soldiers fighting in medieval Scotland might have been in their late teens – as are many British soldiers fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The RSC recruited actors from London youth theatres to help get that message across. One key character is the unnamed Boy Soldier, played by Sam Swann, 20, of the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, whom Greig regards as a rising star.

They are led by a thoughtful commander, Siward, historically the King of Northumbria, who hopes to bring peace. He becomes locked in a power struggle with Gruach. They take the castle at Dunsinane and use it as the base to install Malcolm as king.

"She is my character rather than Shakespeare's in this play. I took the little I do know about Gruach and I imagined from that. To be a powerful woman, in a patriarchal society, you've got to be pretty clever. She's not gone all soppy," says Greig.

"It was enormous fun to imagine it and to take it forward. What was fantastic in operating within Shakespeare's world, mixed up a little bit with the history of Scotland, was it allowed me to really just tell a story about a man and woman fighting over a country."