‘Knock knock’ goes the opening line of writer/director Zinnie Harris’ brand new Macbeth adaptation, pushing through the fourth wall and making sure we know that everything we’re seeing is a story. A story that’s about to be smashed up and rewritten. Yet despite this, the play’s first half lulls us into the notion that Harris’ update is merely an interestingly staged version of the ‘Scottish Play’, with a wartime setting and some modernised characters and lines (did Macbeth, for instance, ever before say, ‘oh for fuck’s sake’?). 

Harris places Shakespeare’s characters in the kind of upper crust, socially volatile society in which you expect backstabbing to happen; the morning after Duncan is murdered, this almost feels like an Agatha Christie. This was a time when death was ringing all around, yet footholds on the social ladder were also up for grabs. The staging is glossy with a dash of gothic, and the three witches shift between angry, vicious maidservants in the house, vengeful at cleaning up the mess of the rich, and beggar women at the door to whom Lady Macbeth repeatedly refuses entrance. 

^{Nicole Cooper leads a superb cast in Macbeth (an undoing) / Pictures: Stuart Armitt}

So far, so Shakespeare with a twist. But it’s in the second half that the ‘undoing’ takes place, and here Harris lets her imagination fly, wrongfooting us, subverting and filling in the blanks in Shakespeare’s text at every step. Genders are reversed, backstories exposed, and we’re never allowed to forget about that fourth wall being constantly hammered on.

Harris lays before us various threads of feminism; the shame of infertility, underestimation of female capability, misogyny, demonization, and the brutal silencing of women seen to be ‘mad.’ But while the piece toys with its fragmented ideas, it both overexplains its standpoint, yet also never really coheres. Still, the staging is arresting (especially the creative appearances of blood) and Nicole Cooper as Lady Macbeth leads a superb cast (Star Penders doubling as a witch and Malcolm is a stand-out). This is an undoing for sure, and an admirably ambitious one.  

Macbeth (an undoing), Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, until Saturday 25 February.