Macbeth, Balfron Tower - theatre review

Set in the Balfron Tower, Felix Mortimer and Joshua Nawras’s ambitious 12 hour production is marred by a convoluted framing device
Methodically sinister: Michael Adams’s Macbeth
William Moore7 July 2014

Macbeth is a great play and everything but wouldn’t it be better if it were 12 hours long? I can’t claim to have asked this question but, for those who have, immersive theatre company RIFT is here to tend to your atypical needs.

Felix Mortimer and Joshua Nawras’s ambitious production takes place throughout Balfron Tower, Erno Goldfinger’s brutalist and now-abandoned high-rise building.

As if an all-night, site-specific Shakespeare wasn’t enough, there is also a convoluted framing device. Our guides for the evening are, in their words, “guardians of the boundary between fact and fiction”. They kill time in between scenes with improv segments in Borat-y accents. It’s all padding — minimal in substance and jarring in tone — and it seems against the ethos of immersive theatre to keep reminding the audience they’re watching a piece of fiction.

As for the actual play, the stretched run time hurts the momentum but there are good moments. The cast, led by Michael Adams’s methodically sinister Macbeth, are strong and there is some inventive use of the unique venue — we first meet the witches huddled around a burning barrel drum in a creepy, underground car park.

RIFT’s website promises that we turn in for bed as the siege rages around us and in the morning awake “to find out whether the battle is won or lost”. This is untrue. As we slunk off to our metal bunk-beds at 1am Malcolm was king and the play was over. Why then keep the audience overnight at all?

Until August 16 (macbeth.in)

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