Showing @ C venues – C nova, Edinburgh until Mon 26 Aug @ 22:00
Macbeth is one of Shakespeare’s most commonly performed plays. Well-known, violent and roughly half the length of Hamlet, it’s also one of the easiest to flog (the two points are not unconnected). And that is very much the sense one gets from the Bunker Trilogy’s staging of the Scottish play, which is the final in the series.
The audience shuffles into the now familiar burrow to be confronted by two uniformed infantrymen wearing gas-masks (similar to a production featuring James McAvoy as the scheming thane a few months back). The eerie figures shuffle about until everyone has a place on the roughly hewn benches and the bards immortal dialogue begins. This play, unlike the two preceding, retains the original text and alters very little but for slight manipulation of time. The direction and acting, as proved twice before, are very strong. However, Macbeth lacks the imagination of previous efforts, relying on the gimmick of its relocation. If Morgana was the most entertaining and Agamemnon the most dramatic, Macbeth is the most accessible but only because of its fame. Yet despite feeling like filler to make ‘trilogy’ an accurate description, it’s by no means an anticlimax to a brilliant trench-life triptic.