A most musical Macbeth

Where Shakespeare in Love is shot through with glossy West End values, Filter's Macbeth is a looser-knit and infinitely more playful affair, which exploits the play's frequent references to sound by allowing proceedings to be led by music in a way the company have previously done on Twelfth Night and A Midsummer Night's Dream. In Macbeth, the action is led by the three Weird Sisters, who operate a series of home-made electronic instruments, effectively conducting the action as they invite Macbeth to join them, thus sealing his fate.

"We wanted to do something completely different," says Roberts during a brief lunch-break. "I've always been fascinated by Macbeth because of there being so many references to sound, and we wanted to look at the psychological journey of Macbeth rather than looking at him as a physical warrior.

"Macbeth is one of Shakespeare's shortest plays, and that fits our language. We've always had this keen sense of anarchy, but I'm also keen to respect the text. Shakespeare's plays can take pretty much anything you throw at them within reason, and we wanted to concentrate on the psychology of the characters, because that makes the play all the more terrifying.

"For the Weird Sisters, for instance, we knew we didn't want them to be all oogly-boogly and weird, and what we discovered is that the more neutral and everyday you make them, the scarier they become. There are more than three of them, anyway, because the Weird Sisters are the band, and two or three of them are played by blokes, so that creates a bit of a departure as well."

Roberts took over the role of Macbeth after his fellow Filter director Oliver Dimsdale, who played the part during the company's 2014 run of the production in Bristol, took time out for paternity duties. The show was created quickly by a cast of seven, with composer and regular Filter collaborator Tom Haines playing a vital part.

"We've approached the play in terms of each character having a musical theme, or leitmotiv, if you will," says Haines. "The audience is hopefully helped along by having these themes, which illustrate a facet of a character or their journey, and which will also hopefully help to illustrate the story.

"None of the instruments we use are acoustic, and nothing is recorded, although a lot of stuff is recorded live and manipulated as we go on these three custom-built synthesisers which the Weird Sisters use to enchant Macbeth. One of the instruments is made of a large coil of springs that makes this rumbling sound, and there's a home-made theremin that doubles as a radio receiver.

"Using music and sound to tell a story is a bit like saying a diagram is worth a thousand words. You can cut an entire page of dialogue and tell something with just a look and three seconds of music. It's blindingly obvious what's going on, and it can be a lot more interesting than having a lot of expositional dialogue."

For Roberts, while this approach is key to Filter's aesthetic, he admits that the text has sometimes resisted it.

"When I was the outside eye when we did the play last year, I was more interested in steering the actors down the path of less is more in terms of the language," he says. "They would tell me how difficult it was not saying things out loud, and I would tell them that, no, it's great. Now I'm in the play, I'm like, ah, I see what you mean."

One of the things Roberts and Haines hope to bring out of Filter's Macbeth is some of the play's rarely explored comedy.

"Macbeth is potentially quite an amusing story," Haines points out.

"There's a lot of dark humour in there in some of the ridiculous situations that Macbeth and Lady Macbeth are thrown into. They're absolutely barking mad, all of them, and there are lots of awkward situations that make for some silly moments. It's also bloody good fun telling a spooky story, and without humour you can't have darkness."

Roberts concurs.

"When we started work on it, we asked people not to refer to Macbeth as a tragedy," he says, "and that really freed things up. You can often get lost in the darkness of the play, and never be engaged by it, but we wanted to find ways of embracing the audience in the way that Shakespeare did when his company just rocked up without any scenery or lighting and just did it. It was a modern form of playwriting then, and we want to treat it as if it's a new play now.

"We've had lots of arguments over the years with people who think we're just updating Shakespeare for the sake of it, but we're not. We want to challenge our audiences, some of whom might think Shakespeare is too academic, but it's not and never was. Shakespeare was writing for an audience made up of a lot of people who were illiterate, so he had to reach out to them."

Next up for Filter is a devised piece, a western, with the working title, Guns and Gold. Scheduled for 2016, the production will see the company work with former artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Tron Theatre, Michael Boyd, on a script by David Greig.

In the meantime, Filter's Macbeth looks set to irk the purists even as it stays true to the play's populist spirit.

"On one level it's an unconventional production," says Haines, "but we try to stay true to what we believe the story to be. It's a group of actors and musicians trying to tell an audience a story, and that's true to what happened in Shakespeare's time, only rather than turning up on a horse and cart, we've got a white van and some speakers."

Filter's Macbeth, January 20-31.

www.citz.co.uk