Eccleston’s Macbeth

Macbeth is a play that resonates for Christopher Eccleston. Aged 17, the actor – who was brought up on a council estate in Salford – was cast in an amateur production, as Macduff. He’d already fallen in love with acting, but Shakespeare was alien territory. “I’d studied Henry V at school and hated it because I was conditioned to say Shakespeare’s not for me,” he told Ben Lawrence in The Daily Telegraph. “But I felt that because Macbeth was a soldier I could play him. My dad had done national service.” Now, 37 years on, he is doing exactly that – opposite Niamh Cusack at Stratford. It’s only his second professional Shakespearean role (he played Hamlet at the West Yorkshire Playhouse in 2002). He’ll be using his native accent, in a Polly Findlay production that reflects contemporary mores. “We were keen to steer away from misogyny in the way Lady Macbeth has been presented as this sexual, manipulative harpy and Macbeth is the innocent male,” he explains. “[In our version] the Macbeths are equal in morality when it comes to murder. Shakespeare is interested in gender and what it is to be male and female. Macbeth, like me, is insecure about his masculinity.”