Review: Playing Shakespeare – Macbeth (Shakespeare’s Globe)

This year’s production in the Playing Shakespeare with Deutsche Bank initiative (now in its 19^th year) is an abridged re-telling of the ever-popular GCSE text Macbeth. In a similarly familiar vein, the production is given a contemporary setting with a heavy presence of army fatigues.

However, there was something strangely uncontemporary and refreshing about the atmosphere in which this production created in the great wooden ‘O’ of Shakespeare’s Globe theatre the night I visited.

The Playing Shakespeare with Deutsche Bank project facilitates free access to theatre for thousands of students aged 11–16 who may not otherwise be able to see live theatre; as such, most of the groundlings present were school students and their very chilly teachers. Witnessing the reactions of the students to the theatrical happenings on stage was inspiring to see, and created an atmosphere surely much like that at any play in the early 1600s. Wild cheers rang out from the student groundlings as the witches (played by Victoria Clow, Lucy Johnson and Rhiannon Skerritt) leapt onto the stage; a chorus of schoolchildren joined in as the witches incanted  ‘Fair is foul, and foul is fair’; and woops of excitement echoed around the courtyard as Lady Macbeth (Hanora Kamen ) and Macbeth (Patrick Osborne) shared a loving embrace.