Romeo and Juliet is his most famous work, Hamlet likely his most iconic (if only for the epochal “Alas, poor Yorick!” monologue spoken to a deceased court jester’s skull). But Macbeth is Shakespeare’s foremost masterpiece – a vicious, unsentimental portrait of power-mongering in the political arena that, to its eternal credit (and to mankind’s eternal shame), has never lost its timeliness. Indeed, recent months seem to have been directly inspired by it.
The Bard’s tales have often been given an audacious makeover to more closely resemble modern times and to attract younger audiences. Baz Luhrmann’s MTV-ified 1996 film, Romeo + Juliet, which grossed almost $150 million worldwide, is probably the most successful remodel. But the staging of Macbeth created by South African theatre company Third World Bunfight, which makes its Canadian premiere at the 2017 PuSh International Performing Arts Festival, may be the most creative yet this century.
Presented in collaboration with Vancouver Opera and the Italian Cultural Centre, this Macbeth – based on Verdi’s opera – relocates the story from 17th-century Scotland to the modern-day Democratic Republic of Congo, where governments, the military and corporations have been complicit in countless deaths in pursuit of commerce. Debuting in Cape Town in 2014, Third World Bunfight’s Macbeth has been staged in Europe, Australia and South America, garnering rave reviews everywhere. (The London Telegraph gave it its highest rating.)
Joseph Bardsley, of Vancouver Opera, anticipates a similarly ecstatic reception here, which is partly why this is the production that finally brought about VO’s long-mooted collaboration with PuSh. “We’ve always been looking for that opportunity – the right piece that would be challenging, musically interesting, that would please opera-goers and PuSh attendees in equal measure, and would also be a really meaty piece for us to devote our energy to,” he says. “Third World Bunfight is very well regarded in Europe, in South Africa, in a lot of the world, and so there was an appetite to try to bring something of theirs – Macbeth, ideally – to Vancouver.”
In Macbeth, Bardsley and his colleagues see a work that can cross barriers, filling seats with veteran opera buffs as well as curious novices. “As Vancouver becomes an increasingly diverse, cosmopolitan, socially conscious city, there’s an increasing interest in work that depicts how we live today as a culture and as a society. Vancouver Opera is very aware of the fact that our art form – for it to be vital and for it to survive – it has to be applicable to events [going on] today and provide audiences with a lens to see themselves and our current world.”
Another example of that contemporary focus was VO’s staging of the ambitious opera Dark Sisters.
“In 2015, we produced the Canadian premiere of [New York composer Nico Muhly’s] Dark Sisters, which is about plural polygamy. It’s quite a tough story, frankly, and in BC there was a huge connection to what was happening in the news in Bountiful,” Bardsley says, referencing that year’s media firestorm around the BC community’s Mormon polygamists. “We saw a real uptick, not just in opera-goers who are curious about whatever we’re doing, but people who were drawn in by that topic. We actually had members of those plural families coming down to see the show. Works like this are a reaffirmation of the value and potency of the art form.”
Macbeth runs Jan. 16-17, 19-21 at Vancouver Playhouse. Tickets and info: PushFestival.ca
