Macbeth: nach Shakespeare

Reading and reception at Mountain View Cemetery

By Heiner Müller | Translated by Carl Weber | Directed by Quinn Harris 
Thursday, Aug. 6, 2009

Celebration Hall, Mountainview Cemetery
Vancouver, BC

Guests raised a glass with the Bard’s murderous couple and Dunsinane’s dead as the sun went down over one of Vancouver’s great new cultural spaces — Celebration Hall at Mountain View Cemetery. Theatre Conspiracy and GasHeart Theatre dug up a performance of Heiner Müller’s adaptation, Macbeth: After Shakespeare. 

One of Europe’s most highly acclaimed 20th-century dramatists, the late Heiner Müller is best known in the English speaking world for the play Hamletmachine.  Conspiracy and GasHeart commissioned Müller’s former colleague, Stanford University professor Carl Weber, to translate Müller’s Macbeth into English for the first time. Darker and more blood-spattered, but also funnier than the Bard’s original, nobody comes out of it looking good.

The evening’s performance was lead by Michael Scholar Jr (Macbeth) and Anna Cummer (Lady M) and is directed by Theatre Conspiracy artistic associate and GasHeart Theatre artistic producer, Quinn Harris.

Now in its 13th season, Theatre Conspiracy brought Live From a Bush of Ghosts and Club PuSh to the 2009 PuSh International Performing Arts Festival, and took home three Jessie Awards for its co-production (with Rumble Productions) of Blackbird by David Harrower at the Cultch this year. Development support for Macbeth: nach Shakespeare is the latest initiative in Theatre Conspiracy’s Envoys Series to investigate world drama in translation.

GasHeart Theatre was co-founded by James Foy and Quinn Harris, who were in residence with Conspiracy, funded by the City of Vancouver. GasHeart's inaugural production The Mechanical Bride premiered at the 2008 Victoria and Vancouver Fringe Festivals. 

“Murder has set the table, treason salted the meat” – Heiner Müller, Macbeth: nach Shakespeare

 

Photo credit: Sharon Bradley