Theatre: Lady Macbeth facing occupational hazards

Published on Wednesday 27 April 2011 19:03

Picking up where Shakespeare left off, David Greig's take on the Scottish Play is a period costume Black Watch, where well-meaning victors face a political quagmire

THERE'S a tyrant in power, hated by many of his own people. There is growing unrest, as rebel leaders plot his overthrow. And there is one rebel commander who is willing to go to a mighty neighbouring power to ask for military help in toppling the tyrant: boots on the ground, entering an unknown country to effect regime change, and – in theory – to install a new and more enlightened system of government.

In the past decade, it's a story we've heard every night on the news: the story of Iraq, of Afghanistan, and now – to some extent – of Libya.

Yet it's also the story of one of the most famous plays in all of world literature; the story of Macbeth, in which an English intervention force, led by the English general Siward and the rebel Scots lords Malcolm and Macduff, comes north to Macbeth's fortress at Dunsinane, to end his rule, and install Malcolm in his place. It was this profound parallel with the events of the past decade that gripped the imagination of leading Scottish playwright David Greig, as he watched a series of productions of Macbeth back in 2004, and made him want to write the play that became his acclaimed drama Dunsinane, premiered by the Royal Shakespeare Company in London last year, and now preparing for its Scottish premiere at Edinburgh's Royal Lyceum, in a first-ever co-production between the RSC and the National Theatre of Scotland.

"I remember that I was sitting watching Dominic Hill's production at Dundee, in 2004, when I suddenly thought – yes, but what's interesting is not the toppling of the tyrant, it's what happens afterwards. I suddenly saw all these extraordinary parallels with the Iraq situation, just at the point when things had started to go very badly there, following the invasion in 2003. The second flash was just this sense of the geography – I was in Dundee, and suddenly the place-names in the story seemed very real, very nearby – Fife, Birnam, Dunsinane, Inchcolm, Scone.

"And then there was a sense of irony that this play that is known everywhere as 'the Scottish Play' should have been written by an English playwright. It's something about history always being written by the victors. So I thought that the whole story was just ripe for speculation, both as theatre and as politics. There was the real story of Macbeth, who was actually a much better king than we give him credit for. And there was this need to write the story from a Scottish perspective."

Greig freely admits that the plays he writes often defy his original intentions, and Dunsinane is an unexpected play in at least two ways. Set mainly in the fortress of Dunsinane after Macbeth's final defeat, and full of a fierce tragicomic poetry of its own, the play explores the triangular relationship between the English general Siward, the newly-installed Scottish king Malcolm, and the surviving queen, Gruoch, who is not dead, but alive, well, and more than capable of disrupting their best-laid plans; Siobhan Redmond is set to repeat, in Scotland, what has been hailed as an electrifying performance in this role.

Dunsinane is, though, primarily what Greig calls a "squaddie" play, about the plight of the English soldiers, shipped up from Kent or Essex to spend a miserable winter in a frozen and boggy northern region where most of the people hate them. To say that these soldiers recycle some common negative stereotypes about Scotland is to understate the case. They ping them about like snooker-balls and, like Gregory Burke's Black Watch – a play which influenced Greig's decision to keep his Macbeth sequel in period, rather than attempt another modern squaddie story – Dunsinane could be accused of showing plenty of empathy for the invaders, and less for the invaded.

"Well, that was about wanting to reverse the situation we find in Macbeth. In that play, Shakespeare writes Scotland; I wanted to write England, and to explore the position of those English soldiers as they gradually find that they have bitten off so much more than they can chew.

"Afghanistan had begun to dominate the news as I was writing the play, and the analogies there were just as stunning as in relation to Iraq, in terms of the effort to impose successful regime change on a mountainous country with a clan-based social structure. So yes, I do write about that with an English soldier's voice. But when you see the play on stage, I think you'll see that it's the Scots who have the very highly developed, delicate filigree of a civilisation, into which this invading force has marched, and that in many ways, it's more sophisticated than that of the invaders."

Greig says, though, that he himself is slightly uneasy about the extent to which his play becomes "a warning against altruism", and against the good intentions embodied in the English general, Siward.

"The character that developed into Siward is almost like some nation-building DIY man, botching the job despite all his best intentions, just as Tony Blair was the politician who wanted to do good in international affairs, and ended up being detested for it. It's about how we want virtue in public life and are drawn to it, but then find that it's not directly correlated to results. And that's unsettling.

"Just in case all that sounds a bit cerebral, though, I have to say that a lot of the appeal of doing this lay in the sheer energy of Macbeth, and the cinematic thrill of the storytelling. I read a great story somewhere that Shakespeare had seen James VI and I, the new king just arrived from Scotland, sound asleep at the theatre, and had resolved to give him a story that would keep him awake – and not just by throwing in a lot of witches, although James was obsessed with them.

"So what I hope is that audiences in Scotland will enjoy the play, and find it thrilling. And I think that just by being Scottish, they're bound to deepen the response to it; I hope so, anyway."

• Dunsinane is at the Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, from 13 May until 4 June, and at the Citizens' Theatre, Glasgow, from 7-11 June.