Mackers! or the Scottish Play

This is a post almost a year late but here we go.

Saint Andrew's Theatre class settled on Macbeth as their play this past year. We went with a female Macbeth and while I'm biased I think it was a pretty darn good production, especially for high schoolers tackling Shakespeare for the first time. It was as presentable as any other production I've seen.

Given the nature of the play and the background of war my design and our concept was a timeless un-ending war. Mixing current and past military uniforms, and styles. The main structure was essentially a pile of junk, with meant to reflect a once great building that has been ravaged by war, who's inhabitants have patched and barricaded using anything they can find creating a patchwork defense.

The audience was again on stage with overflow into the house seats, keeping this in mind I added a temporary thrust stage on top of the stairs leading down the stage. The floor design was a little more abstract but was meant to reflect the two warring houses and the points of their swords, which meet in the middle in a metaphorical battlefield. The circle also became a point of importance and power where the witches met, with a focal point for certain effects.

It was an interesting experience and my stage was covered in drops and smears of fake blood at the end of the show (which by the way "bleeds" through paint). We also got hit by a snowstorm the day we were supposed to open so things were cancelled and rescheduled but eventually it went off without a hitch.

Look for a short sub-post about how I went about creating branches for the soldiers to bring forward as Birnam Wood approached.

An in-progress shot, before the floor and some details were finished.