A Cathedral setting for Macbeth

Aug 3 2007 by Phil Key, Liverpool Daily Post

A new company is launching Liverpool’s first Shakespeare Festival. Philip Key reports

MACBETH is a play with a creepy reputation. There are those who argue that the witches’ incantations in Macbeth are real, that ghastly things can happen to actors involved, and even buildings can be affected.

When the Liverpool Everyman staged a version a few years ago, superstitious performers had the theatre exorcised and more recently a production by the Royal Shakespeare Company had to be called off when the theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon was flooded.

But Macbeth is the confident choice of Liverpool’s latest professional theatre group – the Lodestar Theatre Company – to launch the city’s first Liverpool Shakespeare Festival.

This year, there will be just one Shakespeare production staged in Liverpool Cathedral and the adjacent St James Gardens.

Next year, it is hoped that a series of Shakespeare’s plays will be performed in the festival with different companies involved.

The company of 15 technicians and 11 actors has been rehearsing at the Liverpool Institute for the Performing Arts where I went to see them working under director Max Rubin.

It was Rubin’s idea to start the company and stage a festival, and getting on board at an early stage was Hamburg-born Nina Borgner acting as creative project manager-cum-producer for the event.

She arrived in Liverpool to study arts, music and entertainment management at LIPA and was excited enough by Rubin’s theatre dream to stay on in the city.

He is head of of the diploma acting course at LIPA and another visitor to the city who decided to stay.

He was an actor who had worked across the country, but six years ago was hired to play the Jack of Hearts in the Liverpool Everyman pantomime Alice in Wonderland. “I met my wife in that show – she was playing the Queen of Hearts – but I also loved the city which is why I am still here.”

His plan was to create a profes- sional theatre company which used only local performers and practitioners. “Everyone involved can walk to work,” he says.

He also wanted to provide opportunities to the many people leaving places like LIPA. “Everyone goes to London and I wanted to create a company which would give them a good reason to stay.”

He took the company’s title from a quotation in Midsummer Night’s Dream: “Your eyes are like lode- stars”. “I liked the idea of the company being something to steer your way by.”

So he advertised in industry papers, although word of mouth worked just as well. He auditioned and soon had his ideal company, made up of seasoned professionals and those making their first steps in the profession. “The experienced actors mentor the others,” he explains.

The addition of Nina Borgner to the team was an essential element. “She has whipped the company into shape,” he says. “She has designed the company’s business methods while I do the direction of the shows. Nina is more practical and able than me.”

The decision to stage an annual Liverpool Shakespeare Festival was an early decision. Nina had the task of organising funding and she has done well with support from The Liverpool Culture Company, the Arts Council and various charitable trusts. Deals have been arranged with local businesses.

The festival idea has really taken off, she says. “Tickets are selling well and we have had people not only booking but writing and telling us how much they are looking forward to it!”

Macbeth will be staged between August 16 and September 8. “Originally, we were just going to stage it in the gardens but the cathedral came on board and were very keen, which is why we are staging the first half of the drama inside the cathedral,” she says. It also means that if it rains the entire show can be staged inside.

Rubin is delighted with the setting, particularly the “Gothic feel” of the building.

It has led him to design the show with a Victorian/Edwardian feel to it to capture that mood and give it an original spin. In his production, Macbeth – played by Simon Hedger – wears a top hat.

His cast includes seasoned actors like Iain Ormsby-Knox, who has worked at the National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company, while Hedger is a veteran of the English Shakespeare Company. Director Rubin’s wife, Ruth Alexander-Rubin, has moved on from playing the Queen of Hearts to the more deadly Lady Macbeth.

School groups are among those enthusiastically booking for the event, and Rubin says his production is “perfectly suitable for children”. The power of suggestion, he says, covers some of the more horrid murders. That said, there will be blood “and some severed heads”. He has trimmed the dramas only slightly but has removed the chief witch Hecate – “not really Shakespeare according to some experts,” he reports.

While the cathedral and the outdoor setting will provide most of the sets, he will be using lighting for dramatic effect and some masks. “We have also hired in a team of illusionists to provide some magic. I don’t want to reveal too much but there will be some remarkable illusions, appearances, disappearances and ghosts.”

In the garden performances, incidentally, visitors are advised to take picnic chairs and even picnics. Plans are for a string quartet to play and for a bar. “We want to make it more of an event,” says Nina.

This year’s one-production festival is simply a curtain-raiser for what the theatre company might stage next year. A production has already been decided upon – it will be Midsummer Night’s Dream – and there are talks with other theatre companies to get them to perform their own Shakespeare productions as part of the festival, using the festival name as an umbrella.

It is an ambitious project but one Nina and Max have great confidence in, just as they have with the choice of Macbeth as its first production.

“I am not concerned about the superstitions surrounding it,” says Rubin. “Besides, the curse struck the RSC and has left us alone.”

MACBETH will run from August 16 until September 8, tickets £15 (concessions £9). Some matinees will be staged entirely in the garden. Visit www.theliverpool shakespeare festival.co.uk

philkey