Dominic directed Macbeth:Reboot as part of Morley College’s Acting The Company, during Spring Term of 2015. It was received as unusually clear, audacious and visually compelling. Later in 2015, the group decided to form their own company called Reboot. In this context Dominic directed Macbeth:Reboot again, making it even bolder, and sharper.
Vision
What if you left your better-self behind – and it watched you? What if it moved then from watching to trying to return?
A physical telling of the story, alongside the magnificent text affords us a whole world of theatrical possibilities.
The voices in Macbeth’s head – and Lady Macbeth’s – birth new, darker characters while the other self that is left behind still has a life, observes and ultimately tries to redeem itself.
The ghosts in our play make themselves felt more clearly than ever before. Allied to Physical Theatre techniques I honed working with Stephen Berkoff, ghosts literal, metaphoric and ghosts as energies, become flesh. For Banquo and for all the characters in the play.
Characters change, like a snake that sheds its old skin. And the new skin has a dangerous life of its own.
The focused and imaginative physical actor can create and immediately destroy anything: energies, plots, regrets and re-birth. Macbeth is a tale of darkness: Pablo Picasso’s ‘Guernica’.
Yet the undertow of humanity in the play – also ghosts and echoes – show us we are all joined: I am my brother’s keeper.
These concepts were at the forefront in early rehearsals and now continue to organically point a way forward and a way for our company to work and create theatre..
Dominic Grant 