But it's one of the first shows I look for at the Fringe. And I've seen a variety of versions at this point.
Full text versions, classical productions, modern political retellings, Australian gangsters, World War 2... the works.
What I've never seen is Macbeth played as a comedy. And it absolutely should not work. At all.
But somehow, some way, the Scrambled Prince Theatre Company (a touring youth theatre company based at Eltham High School in Melbourne), managed to do it.
And so we have the very literally titled: Macbeth in space! (and two other locations...).
This is Macbeth as a Star Trek episode, Macbeth as film noir story, Macbeth as a western.
It's also at it's heart an ensemble piece, where different actors play the required characters during the different locations. Space Macbeth is a pompous Zapp Brannigan/Kirk hybrid, Noir Macbeth is a slightly stupid New York mafia boss and Western Macbeth is a very trigger happy black clad bandito.
And this is, somehow strangely, the only interpretation of Macbeth I can really think of where the play is going out of it's way to tell you that Macbeth is a bad guy. I mean I know he does horrible things, but often times there is more than a little part of me what wants him not to fall all the way down the rabbit hole of the latter part of the play, and remain the Macbeth from the first two acts.
But here, he's no hero, not even an anti-hero... in all three parts of this production, he's straight up the villain (and often also a thundering moron) in each setting.
Most of the story gets told across the three segments, although a lot of the details are left by the wayside... which normally I would find problematic, but I didn't mind here since this was more interpretation rather than recitation.
I also think that you can judge a lot about a Macbeth production not just by it's titular lord and lady, but by the interpretation of the witches. And here we get, in order, a hive mind, a trio of beat poets and three poncho wearing singers. With the exception of the hive mind, the same three actors play the witches (technically I guess the same three take part in all the versions, since the hive mind uses the voices of everybody who isn't a main character at that point), and do so very well.
I do need to specifically call out the young woman who played both Space Banquo at the start, as well as the western version of Young Siward (I'm blanking on the character's in-universe name)... she was great as the Kif to Space Macbeth's Brannigan, but she was AH-MAH-ZING as Kid Siward... right from the opening of that section with her tiny cowboy hat, tiny guns and repeated ridiculous expressions she had me in stitches.
In fact the list of people who impressed me or at least made me laugh is fairly extensive. From Space Duncan to Space Lady Macbeth... Noir Gumshoe (again, the character name escapes me) to Noir Fleance to Noir Lady Macbeth... Western Malcolm to Western Lady MacDuff... in fact almost everyone who stepped up into a speaking role did remarkably well.
And the whole thing was actually funny. I think, beyond the performances, it was tying all of the tropes from the three different scenarios to Macbeth that managed to bring out the humour.
Staging was minimal, confined to a few black stools, but each genre change came with a complete, on-stage costume change for the entire cast (all twenty-something of them)... and often the ensemble actually became the staging.
The other thing that shouldn't have worked was putting music in... but there it was, and work it did. The singer, who also doubles as Noir Lady Macbeth, did a fantastic job both with the singing and the acting... although given the aforementioned laughter at Western Siward, I did feel a little guilty that all my attention was focus over there and not on her beautiful rendition of Desperado.
My hat goes off to every one involved in this production, they did a great job and I had an amazing time.
yani's rating: 5 bouncy chairs out of 5
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