Playwright David Greig on William Shakespeare and the unmatched brilliance of Macbeth

“Yes, there’s definitely something about this spot, the fortifications, the realisation that human hands shaped it,” he says. “I’m imagining Macbeth surveying his kingdom. But I am also imagining the woman who had to heave cabbages up here having a rest and exchanging a bit of banter with the soldiers guarding the fort.”

Those who know Greig’s work – which includes the critically acclaimed adaptation of Alasdair Gray’s Lanark and West End smash Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – will recognise such juxtaposition. And they’ll also recognise the significant part that Dunsinane plays in his creative life; his hugely successful 2010 play of the same name was a sequel to Macbeth, a study of what happens after a tyrant is toppled that chimes as strongly with today’s audiences as it would have in Shakespeare’s day.

With all this in mind, I’ve brought Greig up Dunsinane to talk about the influence of Shakespeare on the Scottish imagination and vice versa. The 400th anniversary of the playwright’s death provides the perfect opportunity to have this discussion, of course, but it’s clear the Royal Lyceum in Edinburgh’s new artistic director needs little excuse to talk about his love of – and debt to – England’s national Bard.

Greig, who lives in Fife, says the evocative Scottish places named in Macbeth initially inspired him to think about writing a follow-up, while the aftermath of the Iraq war was playing on his mind. 

“I saw Dominic Hill’s Macbeth at Dundee Rep,” the 47-year-old Scot explains. “As I was watching, my ear was suddenly very alive to the place names. I’d driven up from Fife and a line from Siward about him landing at St Colm’s Inch really stuck out. That’s Inchcolm Island, which you can see from the platform at North Queensferry station. 

“I had previously driven past Birnam and Dunsinane, and suddenly I found myself reconnecting with these places. The same evening I thought of how many productions of Macbeth there had been in Scotland that year – I think there were four. Everyone was talking about toppling tyrants. 

“But it struck me that we needed a play about what happens after you topple a tyrant. Iraq was spiralling into a horrible civil war and in that flash of a moment I decided to write the play that takes place after the end of Macbeth.

“I had a very strong vision of Siward landing at St Colm’s Inch and not knowing what he’s getting himself into; he thinks he’s come to tackle a tyrant but actually it’s much more complicated than that.”

Greig’s lively exploration of the difficulty of rebuilding a nation after war also highlights the experiences of young soldiers, and weaves in modern concepts such as post-traumatic stress disorder. Dunsinane has already become a mainstay of the modern Scottish canon, is performed around the world and taught in schools and universities.

Over the last 400 years Macbeth has found its place as perhaps the ultimate tyrant’s tale. As Greig’s play highlights, however, Shakespeare took considerable artistic licence with his title character; the real Macbeth was believed to be a far more equitable ruler than the bloody murderer depicted on stage. Richard III suffered a similar fate, of course.

In Shakespeare’s mind there would have been very good reason for this rewriting of history, however. Macbeth is thought to have been written in 1606, at a time of great political intrigue and upheaval. James VI of Scotland, a Stuart, had just come to the English throne and Shakespeare would have been keen to flatter the new monarch with a Scottish story, not least one which played to the king’s interest in witchcraft and referenced the founding of the Stuart royal line.

The gunpowder plot of 1605, which aimed to kill James, may also have been on Shakespeare’s radar. According to Greig, however, the genius of the play lies in its writer’s ability to weave an array of more universal themes into this explosive mix, giving it continued relevance more than four centuries years later.

“It’s just the best play about power, governance and tyranny that exists,” he says. “It covers anything from Mafioso families to Communist dictators. It’s typical Shakespeare in that there are endless possibilities. There will never be a situation where the overthrow of a tyrant is not germane to the day’s politics. 

“But he was also thinking about a man and a woman, a couple and their ambition, a wife pushing a husband; it’s all about sexual power. Lady Macbeth has become a byword for wickedness, but like any woman in any patriarchal circumstance she can only exercise power through him; she has to push him into what he does.”

History records that Lady Macbeth, or Gruach as she was known, was of higher birth than her husband and actually outlived him. This also inspired Greig when writing Dunsinane. “I knew that if I was going to do a sequel to Macbeth I would need the best character,” he says. “This was like a double chance – I get the best character, and all the scenes, monologues and backstory that aren’t in the original.”
According to Willy Maley, professor of Renaissance Studies at the University of Glasgow, Greig is one of many Scots who have used Shakespeare creatively.

“I don’t think Shakespeare’s influence can be overestimated,” says Maley. “Nor should we play down the extent to which Scottish critics, directors, actors, writers, biographers, editors and publishers have helped put him on the map.

“Walter Scott’s work is saturated with allusions to Shakespeare, but for me a more intriguing modern example would be Muriel Spark’s second novel, Robinson, which is usually read in relation to Defoe’s Crusoe, but which is haunted throughout by The Tempest.

“Dunsinane is the latest in a long line of creative responses that don’t just pay homage, but actively write back to Shakespeare. Rona Munro’s trilogy, The James Plays, offers another angle on Shakespeare’s histories, characteristic of the bravado and brio of Scottish writers’ responses.

“I would also mention the amazing adaptations over the years, including a memorable production by the Glasgow-based Raindog theatre company in 1992, directed by Robert Carlyle.” 

Carlyle isn’t the only big Scottish name to take on the play, of course. The National Theatre of Scotland’s extraordinary staging in 2012 moved the action to a mental asylum, with Alan Cumming playing every part, while James McAvoy brought out the violence of the play in his critically acclaimed interpretation of the role in London in 2013. Brutality was also central to last year’s Oscar-nominated film adaptation, starring Irish actor Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard, which was filmed in Skye.

That England’s Bard created such a rich Scottish play is intriguing. Through the years Shakespeare and his plays have often been used to represent the very notion of England and Englishness. But Maley, who like Greig was a prominent supporter of a Yes vote in the independence referendum, says the picture – and indeed the playwright himself – is more complex.

“Shakespeare’s Englishness is far less straightforward than most would think,” the academic explains. “He lived through a period marked by a process of political union, a change of state, anti-European propaganda, a war in Ireland that has been referred to by one historian as England’s Vietnam, and religious persecution that extended to actual witch-hunts, not just the metaphorical ones we’re used to. 

“His relationship to Catholicism, his sexuality, his republican sympathies – all are part of a complex critical debate that makes the outdated conservative view of him as somehow celebrating the British imperial monarchy seem absurd.

“I see Shakespeare’s greatness, his genius, in the sophisticated ways in which he viewed war and tyranny. It’s no accident that the leaders of the Easter Rising were great admirers of Shakespeare – they knew a comrade when they saw one.”

I can only imagine that the shadow of Shakespeare looms large in the imagination of just about every English-language playwright. Greig clearly embraced this relationship early on and feeds off it; his first play, A Savage Reminiscence, written in 1990, was another Shakespeare follow-up, this time to The Tempest. The inspiration continues, as does the sense of awe.

“Every play that I write is some type of a rewrite of a Shakespeare play,” Greig admits. “Every play idea I have, part of the process of making it real is that I think to myself: ‘Which Shakespeare play is this?’ Midsummer [2011] has a lot of Midsummer Night’s Dream in it, and when I did the book for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory I spent a lot of time looking at The Tempest.

“Shakespeare has played a massive role in my life. Long before you get to him as a playwright he embodies the way you think about who and what you are. Then, when you’re a playwright you see a fundamental uniting of the principles of drama and the stage. His stories are always incredibly strong, powerful and universal, and open to endless interpretation. You find a character in every play – even the weaker, weirder ones – that somehow embodies a human conflict we all experience. 

“But he was also a commercial playwright who had to sell tickets – the jokes had to be in there. He had to tell these stories with such robust sweep at an outdoor theatre on a blustery Tuesday afternoon, with people spitting and chewing their way through it all. And he manages to do all this with such poetry.”

Push him for a favourite Shakespeare play and Greig names two, The Tempest and A Winter’s Tale, the bard’s final, rather strange works, which don’t quite fit into the tragedy, comedy or history brackets. Greig chose A Winter’s Tale to be part of his first season as creative director at the Lyceum, to be directed by Max Webster.

“For me, A Winter’s Tale has a very blue colour,” he says when I ask about the play’s attraction. “It’s a sad and achy play, a real heartbreaker. That feeling of winter pervades. But I love winter for its absences, its slight sense of hauntedness. There’s something about the tone of A Winter’s Tale I always come back to. It has all of these great things and it’s not performed often enough. I always wanted to do it and with my role at the Lyceum I had no excuse.” 

On the summit of Dunsinane the sun is still shining, the air wonderfully clear, and Greig and I can see all the way from the coast of East Lothian to the Highland borderland. It’s a spectacular sight. A millennium before, King Macbeth and his guards would have looked out from this hilltop fort upon the same landscape. It’s a strange, exhilarating and rather comforting thought.

Macbeth also became famous as the play that dare not speak its name, of course, referred to by actors, directors and stagehands as “the Scottish Play” for fear of the curse that supposedly brings bad luck to productions that flout the tradition. It strikes me that it is King Macbeth himself that has been cursed with the bad luck, fated to carry the creative prejudices of the world’s most famous writer for ever more.

Greig tells me with a smile that he believes Dunsinane has reversed this curse, following a moment of extreme panic he experienced just before the play’s premiere in London, where it was being performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company.

“The audience was gathering and all of a sudden I felt so sick,” he laughs. “Blood drained from my body and I was thinking, ‘What have you done? You’ve dared to write a sequel to Shakespeare and now it’s being performed not only in England, but by the RSC.’

“Then I got thinking that the spirit of Macbeth possibly doesn’t like the traduction he’s had through history, which has maybe been pretty unfair, so he goes around hiding props and making things fall on people.

“Conceivably, my play is an attempt to restore his reputation. So I sat in the audience and made a sort of shamanic prayer to old king Macbeth: this is your chance to have your reputation redeemed, I told him – just bring me a bit of good luck. I was so delighted with the response to the play and I’m now convinced staging it, making this small offering to old Macbeth, is the way to bring luck to your theatre.”

Maybe Greig is right. On our way up Dunsinane Hill we meet only one other walker, Shanley McConnell, an 18-year-old creative writing student who was inspired to come here after reading Greig’s play. The coincidence is striking – Casablanca’s “of all the gin joints” quote springs to mind. But it’s a lovely moment as the playwright and his young fan get their picture taken; she’ll remember this for years to come. 
Perhaps the spirit of old King Macbeth was looking down on us after all.

David Greig’s first season as artistic director of the Royal Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh begins on October 1 with his new version of The Suppliant Women by Aesychlus.