Macbeth

This “Macbeth” is radical, wild, dirty and unpleasant. Blood, nudity and crudity are there from the start, but in a playful way. Their nakedness is like a protective film covering what seem like new-born actors. It is as if the play has been skinned. The box set (designed by Johannes Schütz) for the naked and the dead begins to fill up with detritus from the witches’ first meeting. Their crude artisanship begins: total anarchy, total freedom. A lustful trip between the loins and the grave. We see pissing, shitting, farting – but in contrast with a theatre of illusions Michael Abendroth, Thomas Dannemann, Jan-Peter Kampwirth, Horst Mendroch, Ernst Stötzner, Devid Striesow and Thomas Wittmann reveal their instruments. A conspiracy against the institutionalised theatre – a fitting epithet for “Macbeth”, the usurper who has a kingdom bewitched into his hands. The compulsions of sex, power and play are the motors of Jürgen Gosch’s production.