18 DARTMOUTH SHAKESPEARE WEEK 2019 MACBETH - 2019
Inn Theatre have been producing and performing Shakespeare at Dartmouth Castle since 2002 – this is our seventeenth at the castle, our twenty first Shakespeare including tours and it’s what we are renowned for; truth be told, it’s what we love doing best!
his year’s production is Macbeth (last performed at the castle in 2010) with a cast of young performers, some familiar faces and a director for whom this is his first time directing a Shakespearean play. He’s been in a few – regulars to Dartmouth Shakespeare Week will remember his blistering performance as Iago in 2017 and his Bottom (sorry, there was no way to avoid it!) in last year’s Midsummer Night’s Dream. He has brought a slightly skewed and wonderfully imaginative slant to the play; one of which, we hope, Shakespeare would have approved.
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But would Shakespeare recognise the way we do things now? Would he approve? It’s something to which we give no small amount of thought when we start a production. He might recognise the set-up (the audience look up at the stage) and the open-air location (his company toured when the theatres in London were closed because of the plague) and we hope he would approve of the interpretation of his stories and his words. We do ‘play’ a little, but we hope not so much as to detract from the essential qualities of the whole.
The majority of the plays we present at the castle
are what could be called ‘traditional’ renderings (we’re not overly fond of re-imagining, re-inventing, re-inter- preting: the words and the story should be enough), so if we’re presenting The Dream, then it’s set in Athens and dressed in Athenian costumes. And so it is with Macbeth. You won’t see the soldiers wearing trainers or combatants wielding twentieth century daggers. A case in point in this year’s production was one of Lady Macbeth’s gowns. Our wardrobe mistress had a beautiful piece of shot-silk material she wanted to use, but wasn’t sure that it was in use at that time – remember, we’re talking twelfth century Scotland here. Much scour- ing of the interweb later and she discovered that, actually, shot-silk was made as early as 700 AD and that one of the gowns cited was a purple and yellow one worn on Lindis- farne in the 12th century.
Exactly the colours of the materi- al she had. Result: one beautiful gown and one very happy wardrobe mistress!
And what about the words?
“If just one person goes away with a new-found understanding/enjoyment of Shakespeare, then we’re more than happy.”
Audiences in Shakespeare’s day knew exactly what he was saying. They got the jokes, the double-entendre, references to current events. It was, as live theatre should be, immediate and entertaining. So to some degree we can understand where people are coming from when they say ‘I don’t get it’, ‘It leaves me cold’, ‘It’s a foreign language’. But (and we’ve also been told that this is what we do best) we strive beyond belief to make Shakespeare understandable, current and, above all, fun! Even if it is a tragedy (the play, not the performance!) The number of times
we’ve heard people saying, as they leave a show, something along the lines of: ‘I actually understood what was going on ‘Didn’t think I’d enjoy Shakespeare, but this was brilliant’. If just one person goes away with a new-found understanding or enjoyment of Shakespeare, then we’re more than happy.
We’ve set ourselves one heck of a schedule this year. Not only are we presenting Macbeth for Dartmouth Shakespeare Week, but we’ve managed to get the majority of the cast from the 2017 production of Othello back together, and that will be hitting the road sometime in October. It will be visiting Dartmouth (in the Guildhall), the Barbican Theatre in Plymouth and the Landulph Festival in Cornwall…then, if we can find an affordable venue, we will be heading up the motorway and taking the production to London. What temerity! Keep an eye on our spiffy new web-site (
www.theinntheatrecompany.co.uk) for blog updates on Macbeth, news on Othello and all sorts of other bits and pieces about us and what we’re getting up to.
Tickets for Macbeth are on sale via the website or, if you’re not an internet-type person, you can get physical tickets from Compass Office Supplies, Higher Street, Dartmouth OR Compass Bookshop, Lower Street, Dartmouth.
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