THEATRE

By Mark Brown

The Macbeths

Macrobert Arts Centre, University of Stirling

Four Stars

Touring until October 27

Last year Dominic Hill, artistic director of the Citizens Theatre, staged The Macbeths, his reduced, two-handed version of Shakespeare’s “Scottish play”. Played in the circle studio of the famous Glasgow playhouse, with the superb Keith Fleming as the murderous monarch and the equally brilliant Charlene Boyd as his ill-fated wife, it attracted richly merited plaudits.

Now, with the Citz closed for major refurbishment and the company’s main house productions being presented at the Tramway venue, Hill has revived his abbreviated Macbeth for a Scottish tour. With Fleming currently playing in Hill’s wonderful rendering of Cyrano de Bergerac, the director has made a tantalising and brilliant change to the cast of The Macbeths, bringing in the fabulous Lucianne McEvoy (fresh from her success in David Ireland’s excoriating satire Ulster American during the Edinburgh Fringe) in the role of the regicidal ruler.

Such gender switching is a neat solution to the problem of the predomination of male lead roles in classical drama, up to and including the present day. Not only that, however, this kind of cross casting can bring fascinating new dimensions to well known plays.

Instead of Lady M seeking to, famously, “unsex” (i.e. masculinise) herself, the casting of two women overturns the gendered suppositions of the play. Here the two female characters take on the full range of human capacities, and violence is shorn of its supposedly essential masculinity.

McEvoy’s Macbeth captures powerfully the frenetic energy, self doubt and, ultimately, the deranged certainty of the bloody usurper. It is as if the murderous resolution of Elizabeth I had been combined with the insane sense of entitlement of Imelda Marcos and the moral abdication of Aung San Suu Kyi. Boyd reprises the Lady M role with the same emotional and psychological urgency as before, not least in the play’s resonating emphasis on her loss of a child early in its life.

Impressive and purposeful in its recasting, as intense as its celebrated predecessor, this restaging of Hill’s adaptation makes one feel as if one is mainlining Shakespeare’s play.

Tour details: citz.co.uk

The 306: Dusk

Perth Theatre

Three stars

Until October 27

The 306: Dusk is the culmination of a trilogy of musical theatre pieces by Oliver Emanuel (writer) and Gareth Williams (composer) about the 306 British soldiers executed by the British Army for cowardice, desertion and mutiny during the First World War. Like its sister plays Dawn and Day, this concluding drama is staged by Perth Theatre in co-production with the National Theatre of Scotland and 14-18-NOW (the organisation responsible for cultural commemoration of the centenary of The Great War).

Set, only slightly in the future, during the Armistice Day ceremony in Flanders on November 11, 2018, the play seeks to connect the catastrophe of World War I with more recent conflicts involving Britain’s armed forces. The piece is constructed of three interwoven monologues, by Rachel (a history teacher whose grandfather returned from the war traumatised, played by Sarah Kameela Impey), Keith (a veteran of the recent conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, initially played by Ryan Fletcher, now replaced by Ali Craig) and the ghost of Louis Harris (one of the executed 306, played by Danny Hughes).

The play has moments of undeniable poignancy. Keith’s life is in tatters as a consequence of our society’s neglect of his PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder); the very condition which, during World War I, was, at best, diagnosed as “shell shock”, or, at worst, considered the capital crime of “cowardice”.

However, the structure and balance of the monologues is uneasy, preventing the piece from developing a sense of rhythm or momentum. Similarly, Williams’s music (played by a quintet of piano and strings, and accompanied by a choir and the, it must be said, variable singing of the cast) flips between the emotive and the decidedly saccharine.