Macbeth (Arden Shakespeare. Third Series). Edited by Sandra Clark and Pamela Mason.

Theatre  After a couple of years away from the core series whilst they pay attention to other Early Modern Dramas, Arden returns to Shakespeare with their third edition of Macbeth. Glancing through the list which appears in this year’s Arden catalogue there aren’t that many plays still waiting for the edition uplift from the second and a glance through Amazon indicates that by September 2016 everything but A Midsummer Night’s Dream will be available. Not that it will end here; editors for the fourth series have already been announced with those editions due in the 2020 (which just demonstrates the lead time that some of these books require). How these will differ to the A3s, time will tell.

Anyway back at Macbeth and this edition edited by Sandra Clark, Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of English Studies in the University of London and Pamela Mason currently a lecturer in English at the University of Birmingham. The former provides the introduction and discussion of textual legitimacy in the appendices, the latter is the editor of the text and provides the textual notes including editing justifications also in the appendices. There’s some heroism in this division of labour because while Clark’s work will implicitly be read by the book’s whole audience, Mason’s notes sit within an interstitial consultation space, only referred to if needed which is a shame because they contain a fascinating quantity of trivia.

The introduction freewheels around Macbeth ignoring anything like a traditional structure or reiteration of the usual themes, this being the sort of play for which there isn’t really a shortage of that sort of thing already. So we have a short discussion of Macbeth as an example of tragedy. A close textual analysis of the use of time in the play. It’s setting and realisation of Scotland as a geographical and historical event. A discussion of its sources but note, its adaptation from Holinshed rather than how that chronicler developed his version. Plus a theatrical “history” which chooses themes a key elements of the play, the extent of Macbeth’s culpability, the pre-eminence of the witches, the setting and how various actors and directors have treated the ending.

Much of this underscores that like most of Shakespeare's plays, Macbeth is set in "Scotland" rather than a real place, the the featured "history" is nothing of the sort and that when productions do affect accents and have the cast sweeping around in kilts they're deluding themselves with an approach which has about as much legitimacy as Hamlet wearing clogs and a fez whilst affecting a Scandinavian pronunciation.  Which isn't to say Scottish actors haven't made great Macbeths and there haven't been useful productions set in Scotland, it's just that the underlying elements of the play don't support it, not least because in other plays Shakespeare made the Scottishness of characters a key component.

As is also so often the case with these Ardens, my eye is caught in the appendices which is where the textual discussion resides. For decades, critical mass has focused on the notion that the version of Macbeth we have now is not as originally written by Shakespeare, that its single textual version as it appears in F1 has been interfered with or adapted by another hand, usually attributed to Thomas Middleton, largely because of the similarity with his own play The Witches, notably in relation to some songs. This led to Gary Taylor including the play in his Oxford Complete Works of Middleton’s plays and it’s this analysis that I’ve seen cited as an example of Shakespeare the collaborator.

Clark reiterates of all of these arguments at length with sources before, like so many A3 editors before her, stripping away the hearsay and presumption to reveal that we actually don’t know anything, that the evidence is circumstantial at best.  She cites an electronic analysis by Marcus Dahl, Marina Tarlinskaya, and Brian Vickers (which is available to read online here) which compares the supposed added passages with Middleton's work and doesn't find a match (though she does note that others have argued against their work because the Middleton database they used it incomplete.  But the general message is that just because the play is short and is interestingly structured in places doesn't mean any of it is missing.

Macbeth (Arden Shakespeare. Third Series). Edited by Sandra Clark and Pamela Mason. 2015. RRP: £8.99. ISBN: 9781904271413. Review copy supplied.

Shakespeare at the BBC: The BBC Television Shakespeare on YouTube.

At the beginning of this month, BBC Worldwide began uploading archive television to its YouTube channel which includes samples from the BBC Shakespeare collection.  So far there are seven plays, all complete:

As You Like It

The Tempest

Hamlet

Macbeth

Julius Caesar

The Merchant of Venice

Othello

The Wikipedia has a typically voluminous article with cast lists and background to the series. The rest of BBC Worldwide's uploads are here, whole series of documentaries and dramas including Terry Jones's Medieval Lives.

The Liverpool Shakespeare Festival 2012

The Liverpool Shakespeare Festival 2012 begins soon with productions of A Midsummer Night's Dream ...

"Hermia loves Lysander loves Helena loves Demetrius loves Hermia.

A night of magic and music in Liverpool clubland as four friends try to escape the wedding plans that their parents have put in place. Fairies and dreams light up the night as love tries to find its way. But the course of true love never does run smooth and there is mischief to be had."

And the Scottish Play:

"Gang warfare rages on the streets of Liverpool. General Macbeth is elevated to Thane of Cawdor, the right hand man of Duncan, the gang’s undisputed Kingpin. A loyal soldier, Macbeth is set to be leader one day if he bides his time. He can be Kingpin sooner if he listens to his Lady, screws his courage to the sticking place and takes matters into his own hands."

Both featuring the same cast with includes Michael Ryan (Across the Universe / Hollyoaks) and Zoe Lister (Hollyoaks / Doctor Who) and both at the Royal Court Theatre between 21st September and 13th October.  Full details available here.

Macbeth (Classic Radio Theatre).

How do you create a sense of place in Shakespearean audio productions? A recent Radio 3 production of The Two Gentlemen of Verona became The Two Gentlemen of Valasna and was recorded on location in Maharashtra, with an all-Indian cast, the sounds of the landscape gifting much colonial atmosphere even if something of the story was lost in the abbreviated text. Studio bound, director Richard Eyre’s approach in this millennial recording of Macbeth (also available with the title actors on the cover) is to thread a sound of bitter wind across much of the duration and allow every breath of his actors to assault the microphones punctuating each line and clause, underscoring the emotional resonance of each comma or semi-colon.

His other trump card is to deliver the play in strong Edinburgh accents drawing the audience right back to the turn of the previous millennium and the bloody time of the original monarch, and though Shakespeare has blurred the history (historical Duncan was a much younger man and killed in battle against Macbeth’s forces rather than in his bed chamber), this production does much to underscore the plausibility of his alternative account. Eyre increases the brutality by emphasising the hard consonants in “murder” reversing the trend in some texts (notably the Arden Second Series) to soften the central sound to "murther".

In cutting the horrible deeds of the witches in act one, scene three and diving straight into their meeting with Macbeth, Eyre gives the impression that this will be a less supernatural reading. But the spot music is filled with deathly chords and when Ken Stott’s Macbeth returns to the terrible women who prophesise his doom, the soundtrack fractures and we absolutely understand the mental drift the new king undergoes. Dual casting also offers the possibility that the witches are inhabiting the action themselves, Phyllis Logan and Tracy Wiles playing Ladies Macbeth and Macduff respectively as well as gruffing up their voices to become these weird sisters.

Stott seems initially uncertain in the role, his breaths falling in the wrong places in the verse, apparently making a meal of the iambic pentameter. But beyond the bloody execution, counter to most interpretations, his Macbeth gains an initial startling sense of purpose, his uncertainty only properly returning beyond the death of his wife, his broken sense of the verse returns making his initial hesitancy a feature rather than a failure. Like Ophelia, Lady M is one of Shakespeare’s few roles that never quite works on audio; we need to see her hypnotic mental dance with her husband, the persuasive moment when she fixes him in the eye and all is lost. But Logan cheekily takes advantage of the character's most erotic moment when she calls upon the spirits to embolden her.

Graham Crowdon makes a brief but touching appearance as the Old Man, Rosse’s father though in truth few of the supporting cast really make much of a particular impression, but again that’s as a result of Eyre’s presumed requirement for crisp, clean, lucid diction and interpreting in audio one of Shakespeare’s shortest tragedies in which plot and structure overwhelm character beyond the title role. Nevertheless Tracy Wiles impresses as Lady Macduff, her guttural deathly screams upon the murder of her and her family piercing the ears and Tom Mannion’s Macduff’s reaction on hearing the news of same is one of the production’s highlights.

Macbeth (Classic Radio Theatre) is published by AudioGo. RRP: £13.25 ISBN: 978-1408469781. Review copy supplied.

A Midsummer Night's Dream, Hamlet and Macbeth (Usborne Young Reading: Series Two)

All attempts to reproduce the plays in prose for a younger audience owe a debt to Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare. Somewhat archaic now, they still led the way in demonstrating that it was possible to present these stories without losing any of their thematic resonance and still retain some of the poetry. Their version of Hamlet begins from Gertude’s perspective underscoring the possible truth of her hasty marriage to Claudius before introducing her son and his suspicions in a style which is closer to the mythic tradition.

In writing for a much younger audience still, the writers of this Usborne Young Reading series have decided to pack their versions with dialogue and incident and work much closer to a more traditional picture book approach allowing the illustrations to tell part of the story with dynamic action scenes and abstract imagery. The results are enchanting and more than commemorate their sources. Reading these is to think back nostalgically to the Ladybird Books of my youth, which is where I first visited the fairy tales of Hans Christian Anderson.

The opening page of Louie Stowell’s Hamlet perfectly captures the cold spookiness of the battlements just before the Ghost appears, Christina Unzner’s illustration showing the two guards and Horatio “huddled together” just as the text suggests, the tension palpable. When Macbeth greets the three witches for the first time, they’re the same despicable hags you’d find in the Brothers Grimm giving the reader a familiar image they can immediately relate to, Conrad Mason’s words allowing the picture to tell the story. These characters are hemmed in by bare walls and battlements.

Serena Rigiletti’s brighter images for A Midsummer Night’s Dream underscore the complexity of the farce adapter Lesley Sims is wrestling with and though her designs pick up the similarities between the royal characters, they’re distinctive enough for the reader to keep track of who’s who as the confusion between the lovers takes hold. That’s aided by the extra pages at the front which introduce all of the characters and helpfully gives phonetic pronunciations for their challenging multi-syllabic names (I’ve been mispronouncing Egeus (E-geeus for years).

Part of me is disappointed that more of Shakespeare verse hasn’t sneaked through, Hamlet’s soliloquies barely rendered, no To Be Or Not To Be. But this is somewhat made up for by the clever way some of the motivational uncertainty is kept. When Hamlet tells Horatio that he’s going to pretend to be mad so that his uncle won’t know what he’s thinking, we’re told “Horatio saw a strange look in his friend’s eye. He wasn’t sure if Hamlet would have to pretend” which puts children firmly in the midst of that lengthy debate, leaving the reader to decide as the story continues.

The books have been written in consultation with Alison Kelly, a senior lecturer in the English Eduction (Primary) department at Roehampton University who has helped to develop the whole of the Usborne Young Reading series, someone attuned to the sensibilities of the young judging by her CV. Perhaps I’m just too old now to really understand how well a child would deal with Macbeth’s moral ambiguity though they’re sure to find funny Flute’s realisation on being cast as Thisbe that he’ll “have to kiss Bottom” because some humour works no matter the age of the reader.

A Midsummer Night's Dream adapted by Lesley Sims (illustrated by Serena Rigiletti), Hamlet adapted by Louie Stowell, Macbeth retold by Donald Mason (both illustated by Christa Unzner) are published by Usborne. £4.99 each. ISBNs and other publications in the series available at Usborne's website. Review copy supplied.

Macbeth (Writers and their Work) by Kathleen E. McLuskie.

For the past few years I have been fermenting a theory about the porter’s scene in Macbeth. It’s the one moment of levity in what’s otherwise a fairly depressing, bloody play but it’s hampered within our context because it's riddled with contemporary references which render most of it unintelligible to our ears, let alone funny. One of the best productions I’ve seen did away with the Shakespeare's dialogue altogether replacing it with an old George Carlin routine and I think something similar was happening when the play was originally produced and revived during Shakespeare’s lifetime. I think that each time the porter appeared he would comment on a new set of contemporary events, like a Jacobian version of The Now Show and the version that was published in the Folio was the one that the compiler’s considered to be the classic..

All of which is of course, utter rubbish with little evidential prrof and in her appraisal of Macbeth, Kathleen E. McLuskie, director of the Shakespeare Institute in Sratford-Upon-Avon, highlights precisely this kind of abuse, of the play and its writer. She demonstrates that across time from the plays potential first production through to the twentieth century, the essence of Macbeth's text has been stretched and bent to fit the preoccupations of each period, from Davenport’s blanding out and subtly extraction through to the feminist interpretations of the 70s and 80s that apply readings to the text that say more about the theorists themselves than the work as a piece of theatrical drama. It’s not Shakespeare himself doesn’t cast a long shadow; it’s that the nature of his being is also manipulated to fit each new analysis as well.

Arguably the most interesting sections of the book are when McLuskie indulges in her own brand of literary criticism and strips away the play’s theatrical history to return to Macbeth in its purest form, as the text which appears in the 1623 First Folio and tracks a reader’s experience when faced with just words on a page. She demonstrates that with just the verse and stage directions to work with, the reader’s translation, born of a need to concentrate more closely on the evidence and meaning of the text is at some variance with a theatrical experience in which the material is focused through the prism of the director and actor’s interpretation. When a stage direction says that the witches disappear, in our mind’s eye that’s exactly what happens, we don’t require the suspension of disbelief required in the theatre as the three figures sneak off stage.

If nothing else, McLuskie’s book is worth reading for her evisceration of the whole process of attempting to date the play based on the aforementioned porter’s scene and the connection some have made with the gunpowder plot. As she explains, interpreting the porter’s dialogue and translating the references only offers clues for the date when that scene was written. A contemporary account by someone who watched a performance didn’t think the scene important enough to warrant a mention so for all we know it could have been a late addition or a special interpolation that has since become a staple because it was later put down on paper. Similarly the parliamentary destruction connection is probably wishful thinking by those hoping Shakespeare was using a historical situation to comment on contemporary events, Macbeth for James I. But as McLuskie demonstrates the only solid production date we have for Macbeth is the year when it was published.

Macbeth (Writers and their Work) by Kathleen E. McLuskie is published by Northcote House Publisher's Ltd.. £12.99. ISBN: 978-0746308431. Review copy supplied.

Macbeth (BBC Four).

Theatre Apparently at some point during last night’s broadcast of Macbeth on BBC Four, the title of the play was trending on twitter, which is quite an achievement considering it was running directly opposite the finale of The X Factor and demonstrating that there is an appetite for theatre and especially Shakespeare even on a so-called minority channel. But this was not a simple filming of the original Rupert Goold directed production originating from Chichester Festival Theatre (then the West End, then Broadway). This was a fully cinematic piece of drama that was as interested in the details of the characters behaviour as the depth of the poetry.

A typical example of this was in the moment just before MacDuff discovers his murdered king. Patrick Stewart’s Macbeth guides the general towards the door which will lead to his master and afterwards leans on a kitchen table as Lady Macduff (touchingly rendered by Suzanne Burden), who in this adaptation has been given Lenox’s lines, fills the idle moment with some small talk about the weather. Throughout Stewart watches the back of that door, genially but shortly answering the woman’s statements, but clearly very preoccupied because the sight MacDuff is about to discover etched on his brain and he knows as soon as the door opens, everything changes.

This is Macbeth as chamber piece; shot in and around Welbeck Abbey in Nottinghamshire, Goold’s drama trades the vistas of Polanski and Zeffrelli for a mix of cramped interiors and large halls which seem to oscillate depending upon the timidity or arrogance of the title character’s ambition. The choice of shots too, rather than simply resting on whomever’s lips are moving goes with the emotional centre of each scene. When Lady Macbeth reads of her husband's good fortune, our focus is on the letter. In the moment when MacDuff is related the bleak circumstances of the loss of his family, the camera fixes on his face as Malcolm turns this grief toward revenge.

Goold’s chosen setting is a non-descript east-European country in the mid-twentieth century. Sporting a generous moustache, once in power, Stewart’s Macbeth is represented by a giant Stalin-like portrait in the main hall with the tyrant’s arrogant grasps at holding onto power, the murdering of friends and families in the text fitting neatly into the general sense of oppression exemplified by the archival footage of massive armies marching along wide boulevards that fill the antiquated televisions throughout the living quarters. The impression is of a shift between a benevolent military dictatorship under Duncan into one built on paranoia.

The paranoia engendered in Macbeth by the three witches. In his post on the BBC blog about the making of this version of The Scottish Play, producer John Wyver of Illuminations offers the films Downfall and The Shining as inspirations for the drama and asks for other guesses. As well as The Third Man, for its projections of shadows across the tiled walls of the tunnels, I’d like to suggest the films of Guillermo del Toro for the depiction of the supernatural against a backdrop of jackboots and submarine jackets. Like The Devil’s Backbone in particular, the witches are rendered even creeper by the manipulation of frame rates to create totally unreal movements in the actresses and when Banquo walks he’s captured in the same state as the moment of his death.

These three minxes were genuinely unsettling. One of the worst episodes of The West Wing, from the fifth season, just after creator Aaron Sorkin had left, has all of the main characters literally bawling at each other, entirely out of character, for forty minutes. As unpleasant as that is, if these witches had passed through now and then and conspiratorially given us a wink, the seething mass of negativity in the fictional White House that day would have been rendered totally convincing. These nurses or servants or whatever they are act as puppet masters in this scenario, and it’s not entirely clear, and this is suggested by Shakespeare’s text, whether we’re watching their prophecies coming to pass or whether they’re simply bending the situation to their will, those emotions their playthings.

The brilliance of the lead performances, from Stewart and Kate Fleetwood as his eventual queen is that they don’t tip the balance in our understanding either way. Fleetwood offers a dark, manipulative figure, and sexual animal in the Nigella Lawson mould, but unlike many interpretations there’s a certain collusion from Stewart from the off, as though he was already considering a great future for himself even before the wyrd sisters presented themselves. He might look slightly gutless when Lady M bats away his suggestion that he won’t kill Duncan but is soon turned around when she seductively carries a massive chocolate cake past his eyes. He has that cake and as we see later when just one slice is left, he eats it too.

Four Tragedies: Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth (Penguin Classics). Introduction by Anne Barton. Text edited by Professor T. J. B. Spencer.

Who's There?

A thousand page slab of a volume, the Penguin Classics Four Tragedies (for which a review copy was supplied), gathers between two covers Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth and the (according to a note towards the front “accompanying editorial apparatus” which is “faithful reproductions of the original New Penguin Shakespeare editions”, although the “text has been reset, with the textual notes placed at the bottom of the page for ease of reference, the text itself is unchanged”.

Cover

The section of stained glass window on the front is from the centre of the Betley window which is currently on display at the Victoria and Albert Museum and portrays a hobby horse from a popular morris dance that may have been contemporary with Shakespeare, although the closest connection is in notes about the window jotted into an edition of Henry IV, Part One by George Tollet who lived in Betley Hall where the window found its second home (the first having been demolished).

Nevertheless, its depiction of daggers positioned straight at the man’s head is emblematic of these four plays and of Shakespearean tragedy in general where few characters die noble deaths, generally murdered, often suicidal usually with daggers. In fact, Hamlet is one of the few plays in which daggers aren’t (as far as we can gather depending upon the stage directions) the weapon of choice other than when Hamlet almost takes Claudius’s life.

Publication Data

All four presentations are as detailed and incisively edited as you’d expect if a touch dated; the Hamlet commentary is from 1980, but Othello’s was written in 1968, Lear in 1972 and Macbeth in 1967. This collection was originally published in 1994.  The following review will concentrate on the Hamlet section, for obvious reasons. For a look at other aspects, please refer to the alternative versions of this weblog that I like to think exist in parallel universes.

Introduction

The introduction offers a good general survey of Hamlet’s themes with an emphasis on the revenge aspects, opening with a short history of its antecedents followed by a discussion of sources for retribution. Whilst I don’t agree with everything writer Anne Barton (current Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge) contends, especially in relation to exactly how intimate Ophelia’s relationship is with Hamlet (which I think Shakespeare leaves open to greater interpretation than Barton suggests), she does point to something that I hadn’t noticed before.

To wit: Hamlet is a fan of the theatre and has an expert knowledge of its works, especially the revenge tragedies, and now he finds himself the main character within one, his realisation presumably at the heart of the “Oh what a rogue and peasant slave am I?”. This is an extremely post-modern reading of the play which is worth pursuing, especially in light of the mountain of other criticism which has been published in relation to exactly why Hamlet dithers in his mission.

Hamlet is effectively Randy from the Scream films; he knows the ultimate fate of “heroes” within these kinds of fictions, and aware of the rules governing the plot in which he finds himself but unable to do much about the ensuing carnage. You could even compare the video night scene in which Randy enunciates said rules to Hamlet’s outbursts during The Mousetrap, pointing out the features of the revenge tragedy. Once he kills Polonius, his fate is sealed: “The readiness is all…” etc.

Further Reading

A good survey of criticism, covering a period from the 1930s through to the late 70s, stalking everyone from Jenkins to T.S. Eliot to Wilson Knight and A.C. Bradley. Stored in paragraphs, my preference would have been for a more bibliographic approach and lists though I can understand why that might not have been quite as useful in terms of space in the book’s original edition which would have already been lengthy because of the need to reproduce the play.

An Account of the Text

Neatly outlines the chronology of the early editions which runs similar to the one which has later appeared in the Arden combined edition of Q1 and F, but stops short of considering each of them to be a complete play in their own right, preferring to see them all as raw materials for an editor to put together what they think is the best approximation of what Shakespeare meant (which as I’m discovering can be very mutable depending upon the sensitivity of the relevant academic).

The Text

The resulting main text then, is a conflation, based heavily on Q2 but pulling in omitted passages and readings from F and Q1, though not the latter's exposition scene between Horatio and the Queen, preferring the pirates. Shifting the textual notes beneath the verse brings it in line with the Arden and Oxford, but concern themselves with enlightening the textual richness with a thread of sardonic humour than bringing in literary influences and other critical readings.

How is it, my lord?

Which is the main reason for recommending this edition; like every production of the play, every published edition has its own quirks and the New Penguins is to try and look at the play from a less orthodox perspective. It knows it is part of an eco-system of criticism and that it won’t be the only copy of the play that people, even students will read. So rather than being exhaustive, this Penguin offers the reader a chance to look at it from a slightly different perspective and succeeds.

Four Tragedies: Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth (Penguin Classics).  Introduction by Anne Barton, edited by Professor T. J. B. Spencer is published by Penguin Classics. £10.99 paperback. ISBN: 9780140434583.

Macbeth: A Shakespeare 4 Kidz Musical Adaptation

Macbeth played by Jason Lee Scott
Directed by Julian Chenery

Yes, indeed. The Hamlet Weblog is a broad church and with Shakespeare 4 Kidz’s 3D film in production, they were good enough to invite me along to see their theatrical version of Macbeth perhaps to give some idea of what to expect from a visit to Elsinore. So last night I was installed in the stalls of the ornate Palace Theatre in Manchester amid school groups and families watching a child friendly rendition of one of the bloodiest of tragedies. Adapting the Scottish play for a young audience is certainly provocative even at time when arguably kids are being exposed to violence far more than in the past. How would they manage to keep all of the black magic and death without watering down the play's moral message of cause and effect?

The answer is to simplify and modernise sections of the text and add some song and dance numbers and turn the play into a musical. It’s initially quite disappointing that so much of Shakespeare’s verse couldn't been retained and arguably the most powerful moments are when the undiluted text makes an appearance (“Life is but a walking shadow…”). But cunningly, though the iambic pentameter is often jettisoned for clarity's sake, by seemingly taking its influence from Japanese Kabuki theatre in which the characters wear their hearts on their sleeve, the actions are plainly presented, the results generally unsubtle, the performers addressing the audience more than themselves, the overall sentiment is retained.

As is the plot. Done badly, once Macbeth has the Scottish crown, the play can easily descend into a soup of skirmishes and witchery, but adaptors Julian Chenery and Matt Gimblett's script and songs very cleanly set out the consequences of the thane’s actions and how his arrogance will ultimately lead to his downfall. The plot may be simplified but they don’t shirk from showing the more gruesome scenes, including the murder of MacDuff’s household and how that leads to the battle which spans act five. I’m sure I heard a gasp when it became apparent that Macbeth had misinterpreted the witches warning about the circumstances of his death.

In this production, witchcraft is pervasive, the heavily hooded weird sisters (close cousins of the Wraiths from the Lord of the Rings films) never far from and sometimes directing the action. In places they’re genuinely scary simply because of the wrongness of their movements, their speech patterns and the deathly howls which sometimes emanate from their mouths (the voices of the all actors are augmented and projected by speakers on either side of the stage) and it's their incantations that bring the curtains down, suggesting that at any moment their dark forces could break through into the auditorium.

When you add to this the musical element, if you’re an adult and with more than a passing knowledge of the play, Chenery's Macbeth becomes a camp extravaganza, a great big entertaining panto. For much of the duration I grinned from ear to ear even as Thane of Cordor considers the death of first Duncan then his co-captain with songs like “How Do You Murder A King?” and “Banquo Must Go”, not entirely sure how knowing the declamatory acting style is supposed to be but loving each glorious second of it, as the dialogue drift from straight Shakespeare to the modern idiom into the mix of the two which inhabits The Tudors tv series (incidentally the photographs you can see here were taken at Hever Castle, childhood home of Anne Boleyn).

At the epicentre of all this is Emma Odell’s incandescent sitcom take on Lady Macbeth, who’s reaction on hearing that her husband might have murdered his king but forgot to pin the murder on the guards, is as delicious as one of Sybil’s verbal disembowelments of her husband Basil in Fawlty Towers. It’s not hard to feel sorry for Jason Lee Scott’s chiselled but dominated Macbeth. The deterioration of their relationship is like watching an alternate reality where Prince Charming has married one of Cinderella’s sisters instead and is now suffering the consequences. Odell arguably gets the best song too, “Out, Damned, Spot!” a scat like descent into madness.

But the moment which brings the best response from the children in the audience and when they clearly become locked into the show is Noel Andrew Harron’s Porter. The one deliberately light moment in the play, written by Shakespeare (like the Gravedigger in Macbeth) to give the clown in the company something to do, the Porter can be an opportunity for the show to relax for a moment after the murder of King Duncan. I’ve previously seen his speech replaced by a thematically relevant routine by George Carlin and S4K offers a child friendly version of that as Harron offers the audience some slapstick, knock knock jokes (“Knock knock” “Who’s there?” “Toby…” etc) and a short lesson on duplicity.

The children were wrapt, and that’s the point. At the interval I glanced about the theatre and I think every young face in the place was smiling, eyes glowing. At the end of the show, the deafening applause and cheers as each actor took a bow demonstrates that Chenery, who also directs, has pitched the production perfectly. If kids hate something, you’ll know instantly, through their chatter and toilet visits during the production and general indifference, but that’s not what I saw. If they were talking, it's because they were asking the adults questions, their eyes constantly fixed on the stage and Jaimie Todd’s set design which implies the kind of ruins you might find in a similarly addictive storybook. If any of those children grow up remembering Macbeth as an exciting, approachable spectacle, then Shakespeare 4 Kids’s is to be commended.

Macbeth: A Shakespeare 4 Kidz Musical Adaptation is touring. Click here for venue details.