Macbeth - The Pantaloons

Film noir. Intrigue, suspense, guns, cars, darkness, saxophone music. Witches in bins? Shakespearean knock knock jokes? Stories from the audience? Why not? This is the Pantaloons, after all.

Their take on Macbeth (which visited Eastbourne’s Underground Theatre on 17/10/15) incorporated all of the above and much more in a tight, dramatic and inventive production.

I particularly liked the witches. Three puppets in a bin, like some kind of sinister Sesame Street, lit from beneath and swaying and cackling in the darkness. Brilliant.

The light (or lack of it) and sound throughout was really effective – atmospheric, suspenseful, and at times used for comic effect. The film noir homages, the shadows, the way many of Macbeth’s soliloquies were delivered in semi-darkness in the midst of the audience – all these combined to create a much darker show (literally and metaphorically) than we’re used to from the Pantaloons.

And it was great. There were some pretty powerful moments – from Macbeth (Chris Smart), Lady Macbeth (Alex Rivers), Macduff (Neil Jennings), and Malcolm (Hannah Ellis) as our narrator.

I heard several audience members afterwards comment on the dexterity with which the cast switched between drama and comedy. There’s not a huge amount of comedy in Macbeth, but the Pantaloons drew out and made the most of what there is. Kelly Griffiths, in particular, struck up a great rapport with the audience as the Porter: getting members of the audience to tell stories of strange goings-on and riffing on these; telling jokes; encouraging us to join in as guests at the banquet. The audience always becomes part of the play at a Pantaloons show, and Macbeth was no exception.

A packed house at the Underground Theatre all left the place buzzing and saying how much they’d enjoyed it. The cast may have sung about the curse of Macbeth, but luckily the curse didn’t seem to be in evidence on the night.


The Pantaloons are on tour with Macbeth until the end of November – see their website www.thepantaloons.co.uk for full tour details.

Macbeth et son ouvrier - Ecole dramatique de Yajlou (Iran) at Espace Charles Trenet, Tain / Tournon

This was a very multilingual experience. While I was on holiday in France, I saw an adaptation of Macbeth performed by an Iranian company. It was performed, according to the programme, in Azerbaijani Turkish, with a few simple words of French thrown in here and there.

So the largely French audience on Tuesday 29^th July in Tain didn’t understand the words any more than I did. Quite a unifying experience, in a way.

As with the Globe’s multilingual season a year or two ago in London (see my reviews of the Georgian As You Like It and South African Venus and Adonis), this production had to use something other than words to communicate with the audience.

A live musical soundtrack provided by three musicians on the side of the stage helped to convey what was going on in the plot. Shadow puppetry, costume and props also combined to create a sort of symbolic visual language for the audience to interpret, and it was a very physical piece.

Although this was clearly not Shakespeare’s play in translation (it was a 45 minute piece set on a construction site), it probably did help to know already how the story of Macbeth unfolds. I think, in fact, that the few English people in the audience may have understood more than the French, simply because most of us had studied Macbeth at school.

So when Lady Macbeth started furiously rubbing her hands, we knew that this was the ‘Out damned spot’ bit. And when the three actors (for there were only three in the cast) became a sort of three-headed tangle of bodies and speech, we knew without needing words that they were representing the witches.

But for me, it wasn’t just the adaptation, the language and the physicality that made this an interesting piece. It was also interesting because of the cast.

As I said, there were only three actors. Two of these were women.

Now, I don’t know a great deal about Iranian culture (although Persepolis opened my eyes a little), but from what I’ve heard I rather gather that women on stage might be frowned upon by the authorities. So it was interesting to see the roles of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth performed by women in that context.

Was it significant that as Lady Macbeth went mad her headscarf worked its way loose and finally came off? Did I only notice that because it was an Iranian company performing in France, where there have been particular controversies over the wearing of headscarves? As neither French nor Iranian, do I interpret the piece differently from either of those audiences would? Or perhaps my gender has a bigger impact on my reading of the production?

These were questions I came away with, and I do like to leave the theatre with questions.

A very interesting evening.