Dundee Rep, October 3 to 4

Given that Macbeth (aka The Scottish Play) is over 400 years young, it’s a tribute to the work’s longevity and Shakespeare’s sustained relevance that it continues to be made anew on stages and screens.

The Citizens Theatre production of The Macbeths (directed by Dominic Hill and scripted by Frances Poet) debuted last year in Glasgow before heading out on tour now. But there has already been a major tweak to the 2017 version with the roles in this two-hander about the Scots warrior and his powerful wife both going to women.

Charlene Boyd reprises the part of Lady Macbeth which earned her a nomination in the Critics’ Awards for Theatre in Scotland, while Lucianne McEvoy takes on the role of her ambitious yet tormented husband.

“When we did it at the Citizens, it was an experimental and exploratory work as we had always wanted to see how we could pull it apart and see what came out of it,” recalls director Dominic Hill.

“So when we decided to do it again, we wanted to take that further. I always think that when you’re doing a very wellknown play like Macbeth, the audience hears lines in a different way when you change things like the gender of the actors.

“Our play is about a relationship and how that relationship operates under the duress of past actions, and that hasn’t changed at all.”

While productions of Macbeth rarely come in under the two-hour mark, Hill and Poet stripped back the cast (the iconic witches and the murder of Banquo are both heard via reel-to-reel tape recordings) and concentrated on the key couple, with the show clocking in at 70 minutes.

“The core action of the original play and probably its greatest parts are the conversations between the Macbeths themselves. So in some ways it was easier than you might think to distil the scenes between them and turn it into a coherent piece of theatre.

“Part of the issue was ensuring that the story we needed to tell was told just between those two people, but it was always my thinking that the meat of the play is with them.”

Having been involved in several productions of Macbeth (including Verdi’s opera version), Hill has a wealth of experience in getting inside this particular story and grappling with its themes.

“I do think that it’s an extraordinary and accessible text. It’s a great story about a couple being undone by their own actions and it can be accessed by an audience today as easily as it was 400 years ago.

“Even if you don’t know Shakespeare, I think both linguistically and in terms of action, it can reach you quite easily.”