To summon up witches is to play with fire. Could the same be true about summoning up a dead playwright? That is what writer/director Zinnie Harris does in her audacious conjuring of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. It is not so much a revival as an exhumation, one in which she dares to speculate what the playwright might have done had he been true to his own instincts.
For this is a tragedy in which it is not Lady Macbeth but her husband who is mentally unbalanced by the couple’s murderous path to power. Now, Macbeth is the one who, having been told he will sleep no more, becomes ever more delusional. The man who thinks he sees the ghost of Banquo is the same man who goes on to cry, “out damned spot”. [READ MORE]