Macbeth bleeds in Bard on the Beach's dystopian future
Director Stephen Drover reimagines Shakespeare's tragedy in a post-catastrophic world where witches give way to climate and moral decay.
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Stephen Drover is negotiating with Bard on the Beach production staff about how much fake blood he is allowed to shed on stage for Macbeth. If you're doing a play like Macbeth, he believes, you have to own its brutality.
Drover's vision sets Shakespeare's tale of a power-hungry general in a dystopian future—not post-apocalyptic in the Mad Max sense, but rather on the other side of something catastrophic, where humanity doesn't know what to do with itself. Think The Walking Dead or The Last of Us: no rules, no models, structures about leadership and hierarchy become tribal. All bets are off.
"The play is very much about terror and about facing things that you thought weren't real and facing the idea that some things that you believed in are actually not true anymore," Drover said. "So I asked myself, what are we afraid of—what are the things that are of primary concern to us? I started to think about climate change and moral decay. We're kind of afraid of the future and what comes after."
For Drover, adapting one of Shakespeare's bleakest tales was about keeping what made the original a success and translating it into today's world. Witches making potions was once a source of real fear; now it's become Halloween kitsch. "I don't think that's what's needed right now, because the play wasn't originally written for an audience to laugh off witches dancing around a cauldron."
Macbeth isn't exactly known for its levity, and Drover's version stays true to the seriousness of the source material. At a festival also staging the lighthearted Merry Wives of Windsor, both plays feature the same cast doing double-duty. The contrast is stark—Drover describes Merry Wives as "probably Shakespeare's least serious play."
The production runs through September 19 at the BMO Mainstage at Sen̓áḵw–Vanier Park. Drover was still fine-tuning how much blood the stage could handle, but one thing was certain: he sent the production team a video clip of that moment in The Shining where blood comes in from the elevator doors as a reference point.