MACBETH

Directed by Max Stafford Clark for Out of Joint.

I’ve done a bit of Shakespeare –, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a Romeo & Juliet, King Lear and two Macbeths – and In almost all of them the director began the process by encouraging me to write lots of music; for every scene change, underscore, two coats the lot. And in every instance we ended up discarding most of it…because Shakespeare doesn’t need it. You might want something at the top, something at the end and a couple of flourishes, plus whatever music the play itself indicates. But nothing more, it just gets in the way of the poetry. The one exception was working on Out of Joint’s Macbeth, set in civil war-torn Africa and with Idi Amin as the role model for Macbeth himself. This production was a great success touring nationally and globally a number of times.

The director Max Stafford Clark was (as he always is) clear as a bell with what he wanted: an opening so that the audience enters to the mood of the witches; and an ending that combined the two big themes of this production – an African setting for the Scottish play.