Interludes

THE HANGOVER REPORT – Giving agency to Lady M in MACBETH (AN UNDOING), Zinnie Harris’s feminist spin on “The Scottish Play”

• By drediman
• April 25, 2024
• No Comments

Over at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Brooklyn’s Fort Greene neighborhood, you’ll find Theatre for a New Audience’s presentation of the Royal Lyceum Theatre Edinburgh production of Macbeth (An Undoing) written by Zinnie Harris (Harris also directed the production). Presented in conjunction with Rose Theatre London, the work is in essence a feminist spin on Shakespeare’s “The Scottish Play”, in which Harris gives Lady Macbeth full agency in her involvement with the play’s narrative trajectory — before pulling the rug from beneath her.

The first act unfolds as you’d typically expect from Shakespeare’s dark tragedy; that is, up until the murder of Banquo — which, by the way, happens to occur offstage, to fascinating consequences. From the get go, you’ll notice that Harris has replaced much of Shakespeare’s text with modern, more accessible vernacular; only occasionally does Harris strategically insert the Bard’s language. In the second act, the piece departs farther from the original plotting. It’s here that the playwright starts to really refocus and unpack the psychological underpinnings of the play, in the process more fully fleshing out the character of Lady Macbeth (in the original, not much is seen of her in the latter half of the piece), almost as if setting her free. Although not all of Harris’s bold decisions works — there’s a delusional twist late in the play that diffuses the play’s feminist argument — I applaud how she has audaciously taken the play in interesting new directions, thereby testing the limits of Shakespeare’s underlying framework and intent.

Harris’s production is relatively minimalist (the set design is by Tom Piper), effectively using a shadowy lighting design (Lizzie Powell) and aggressively implemented sound design (Pippa Murphy, whose work is perhaps a tad too aggressive) to create the appropriate atmosphere for her experiment. As far as the acting is concerned, the cast does a solid job of injecting life into Harris’s vision. As the Macbeths, Adam Best gives an appropriately emasculated version of the the title character and Nicole Cooper holds the whole thing together with a sturdy performance that dominates every scene she’s in.

RECOMMENDED

MACBETH (AN UNDOING)
Off-Broadway, Play
Theatre for a New Audience
2 hours, 35 minutes (with one intermission)
Through May 4