Thoughts on Macbeth (and Smokey Robinson)
by director David Heley
So – there I was sitting in Jimmy Boyle’s bar in Edinburgh around 3 am following another hectic day at the Festival in the mid 80s. We had just been to an Attacko Decente gig and had spent most of the previous day celebrating our final performances of our play, The Swindler. It was a morning show and we had given away a really good breakfast as part of the ticket price (the play had a lot of food in it – it was a Complicitie kind of obsession at that time) so we had made a huge loss but had sold out every morning (there’s Edinburgh for you, right there in a nutshell!)
So broke (again) and thinking about giving up acting (again) we all thought about the weirdest shows we had seen during the 4 weeks. I had seen a production by the National Theatre of Brent of 2001: A Space Odyssey which took place in a Morris Minor – the audience in the back and the cast in the front involving a gorilla suit, a rubber bone, tinny music on the tape machine (Also Sprach Zarahustra) and well, a blank domino. This too sold out every performance.
I had also seen brilliant theatre from Japan, One Fine Day, about Hiroshima involving actors making origami houses all through the play over a running commentary from the pilot of the Enola Gray. When the bomb was dropped the actors fell onto the 100s of house they had made during the show. It was pretty special – the finest piece of theatre I have ever seen.
Someone said she had seen a Twelfth Night in the park featuring a glam rock band and the music of Sweet, T Rex and he who shall now be nameless (GG). At the moment we played the what-music-would-go-with-what Shakespeare play game and I came up with Tamla Motown/Macbeth and everyone looked at me as if was a complete Malvolio with a double gartered brain … and there it was … I have never quite managed to shrug off the impossibility of this juxtaposition (to make it worse Jimmy put on Tracks of My Tears right then) and so here it is … 25 years late.
A Day For Night Theatre Production is association with Pitchy Breath Theatre Company
Performed at the Hawth Studio
29th April to 1st May 2010
