“I’m Lovin’ It”: Variations on Macbeth

While many productions understandably emphasize Macbeth’s crowd-pleasing supernatural aspects, a new production in Stratford-upon-Avon reminds me that I’m drawn to versions of the tragedy that focus more on the human struggle and find new and unexpected ways into Shakespeare’s tale of “vaulting ambition.”

On stage

In the current intriguing Royal Shakespeare Company production (running through December 6), director Daniel Raggett sets the Scottish play in a Scottish pub, transforming the Thane of Cawdor into a 1970s-era gangster and pub landlord and his wife into what might reasonably be called Landlady Macbeth. Featuring flick knives as “swords” and a Duncan who’s a drug kingpin instead of a king, the intense-sounding production resembles a world in which, according to one critic, “Succession meets Sons of Anarchy with a hint of The Sopranos.” The weird sisters, rather than being witches controlling the action, are in this version three barflies who kibitz and prophesy from a table in the corner, turning the Hecate scene into a seance and adding to a “bloody, coarse, and dirty” vibe reminiscent of both scary movies and the sudden violence of a gangland tale.

Yet the ambition of Macbeth and his Lady, played by Sam Heughan (Outlander) and Lia Williams (The Crown), remains front and center in the intimate confines of The Other Space, the RSC’s smallest performance venue. Williams, in particular, according to Mark Lawson in The Guardian, avoids playing her as a “stereotypical scold,” and “is clearly the brains of the relationship” who gets several additional silent moments that hint at the “deeply painful” past that motivates her actions.

On the page

That past gets a welcome and in-depth exploration in Joel H. Morris’s 2024 debut novel All Our Yesterdays, a perfectly-titled prequel in that the full quotation— “And all our yesterdays have lighted fools / The way to dusty death”—describes a backstory to tragedy. Morris sets his “novel of Lady Macbeth” ten years before the events of Shakespeare’s play, and threads the narrative needle by impressively combining details from both the historical record with the events of Shakespeare’s play. The actual Lady Macbeth was the daughter of a nobleman, granddaughter of a Scottish king, a cousin of Macduff, and married in her teens to the Mormaer (Earl) of Moray, with whom she had a son. As Morris explains in his historical note, “After the mormaer and fifty of his men were killed after being locked in a building and burned as they slept, she married her husband’s murderer: the thane Macbeth.” While Morris captures a spiritual otherworldliness that honors Shakespeare’s play without copying it, his focus remains on his heroine’s navigation of the masculine and superstitious power structure, and shows just how closely related all of Shakespeare’s characters are. His depiction of the reigning Scottish clans — nobles and mormaers and thanes, oh my! — illustrates convincingly that in this case, all politics is not just local, it’s familial.

On film

Scotland, PA is a surprisingly fun variation of Shakespeare’s tragedy played in a darkly comic vein. The 2001 film returns us to the cutthroat world of 1970s fast-food restaurants, accentuating the absurdities of Shakespeare’s plot and highlighting the comedy without losing the original’s grim repercussions of lust and ambition. Joe “Mac” McBeth and his wife Pat, work at a failing burger joint owned by Duncan (who used to sell donuts in a joke so thrown away I completely missed it until my most recent viewing). After meeting three stoner carny workers, one of whom tells fortunes using a Magic 8 Ball and foresees a drive-thru window in Mac’s future, Mac and Pat decide to murder Duncan and take over his business. When Duncan falls headfirst into the fry-o-later, the splattered grease burns Pat’s hand, which continues to torment her even after it’s healed like the imagined blood Lady Macbeth can’t wash away. The new restaurant Mac and Pat create is called (of course!) Mcbeth’s, complete with golden arches and a drive-thru window, but as Lieutenant McDuff (Christopher Walken) gets closer to solving Duncan’s murder, Mac and Pat, who initially couldn’t keep their hands off each other, retreat to their own corners of guilt and isolation and begin to turn on each other.

Filmed in Nova Scotia—which, appropriately enough, is Latin for “New Scotland”—the movie, written and directed by Billy Morrisette and including the credit “Story by William Shakespeare,” contains additional Shakespeare easter eggs. The plaid oven mitt Pat covers her burned hand with is made from the actual Macbeth tartan. The fortune-telling carny played by Amy Smart speaks occasionally in a man’s voice, echoing the androgyny of Shakespeare’s original witches who, as Banquo declares, “should be women, / And yet your beards forbid me to interpret / That you are so.”

Scotland, PA also inspired a well-reviewed stage musical, though I doubt its score can match the classic-rock power of the movie’s soundtrack, which includes banger after banger like the foreboding “Bad Company” and several other haunting-in-context songs by the group of the same name (2025 inductees into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame), as well as “Can’t You See” by the Marshall Tucker Band, the chorus of which—“Can’t you see, whoa, can’t you see / What that woman, she’s been doin’ to me?”—feels like Mac soliloquizing about his wife.

And in the deepest cut of all, the ridiculous but catchy “Beach Baby” gloriously underscores the montage of the McBeths growing their successful new franchise—and was co-written by a songwriter with the wonderfully improbable name Gill Shakespeare.

There are Macbeths out there for every taste, of course, but if, like me, you’ve been longing for versions of Macbeth that pulled back on the supernatural and focused on the personal, you might love these interpretations as much as I do.