May 23rd marked the opening night for the long-awaited Electric City Players’ (ECP) adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Hosted at Market Hall Performing Arts Centre in Downtown Peterborough. Co-directed by Trent Professor Andrew Loeb and local theatre legend Jacqueline Barrow, the show is set in a post-climate meltdown Scotland where the ravaged lands set the perfect scene for great kings, fallen foes, and the ultimate betrayal.

Barrow and Loeb are also co-founders of ECP, a newly formed Peterborough based community theatre arts collective group. The collective “aims to foster community through artistic creation”—something well achieved in the local theatre company’s first-ever production. Macbeth is an ambitious undertaking for the company, no less because for many in the show, it’s the first time they’ve performed Shakespeare.

Arthur co-editors Abbigale and Evan were lucky enough to attend a dress rehearsal the morning of the show’s grand opening, as well as talk to the show’s directors and some of its main cast.

Below they have gathered their thoughts, for your perusal, in a sort of impromptu Arthur Theatre Club, in which their own opinions mediate conversation with the Electric City Players themselves.

Abbigale: Having studied English literature at Trent University for the past three years, it is perhaps my greatest hidden secret that I know virtually nothing about Shakespeare’s plays. I read Romeo and Juliet in the ninth grade and from then, of no one’s fault but my own, I never felt an inclination to read or study the classic plays. 

That is until I heard about Macbeth being adapted in my very city. 

This, I admit, piqued my curiosity greatly. 

Luckily, my co-editor and Shakespeare fanatic accompanied me to the dress rehearsal. It was a unique experience walking into a Shakespeare play with very little background knowledge to compare the performance to. This said, I cannot stress enough how much the play blew me away. 

It is worth noting how having little to no knowledge of this play did not, in the slightest, hinder my experience. The eerie backdrop projecting haunting black and white film against the smoky stage accompanied the actors in grief, pain, and triumph—acting as a guide that I found extremely helpful in contextualizing the tormented Scottish characters. 

Plays are by no means different from other forms of media in the sense that each audience member brings their own experiences to the action unfolding on the stage. In the context of my limited Shakespearean education, I was still able to leave Market Hall having what felt like an intimate understanding of all the characters, and a burning passion to yell “All hail the King of Scotland!”.

I know I am not alone in my shameful secret, and I urge any readers finding themselves in my shoes to not let it deter you from two hours of wildly thrilling performances.

Evan: I, by contrast, have a considerable history with Macbeth. The play is one of my favourite of Shakespeare’s.

Being the daughter of a writer I was, of course, brought up on the classics. My mother has a beautiful red leatherbound volume of the collected works of Shakespeare, and from around age 11 I was working my way through them. I was the kind of sixth grader who was way too proud of having read Romeo and Juliet (despite not getting any of the sex jokes) so it’s fair to say you’d probably have hated me.

My first time reading Macbeth, however, was in my grade eleven Advanced Placement English class. I think part of the reason I really love this play is because this was a very small class—a dozen people or so—and we were all reading the play together, and bonding over it all the while.

Macbeth became the subject of in-jokes in our class. We began to inject lines from it (“What, you egg!”) into our collective vocabulary. It became a signifier of togetherness for this weird little gaggle of nerds that populated our classroom. At one point, my teacher had each of us memorize the dagger soliloquy and recite it in front of the class for extra credit. 

Of all of Shakespeare’s plays, and especially of his tragedies, I find Macbeth to be delightful in just how loathsome its protagonist is, and how willing the story is to step into high melodrama. As opposed to the characters of Othello, Cymbeline or Troilus and Cressida, Macbeth is reviled both by the play’s characters and the text itself. He’s irredeemable, and there’s something compelling about seeing the lengths his own self-hatred drives him to.

I think this is something the Electric City Players nailed. Macbeth is not a tortured but sympathetic hero. He knows what he’s doing is wrong, but he is a man who has already killed his way to the top and whose only way to stay there is to keep killing.

Abbigale: The contrast in which Simon T.J.H. Banderob portrays Macbeth falling deeper and deeper into madness at the behest of his wife, jealous rage, and bloody paranoia was unbelievably compelling. In fact, the entire cast of characters fed their unique personalities off of each other in a reflective performance that highlighted the tormented king’s path to destruction, and the bodies that fall in his shadow.

Evan: There really aren’t enough good things I can say about the casting. Despite it being Banderob’s first time playing Macbeth, you really can’t tell. They manage to sell Macbeth’s change in temperament completely despite the fact that it happens so quickly.

In spite of his pompous stage persona, Banderob is remarkably modest when talking about their role. When Abbigale asked them how they were feeling immediately after the show, Banderob simply replied: “Exhausted!”

Banderob went on to tell us that “When Eddy [Sweeney], who plays Macduff, finally kills me and I collapse on the floor, it brings me so much relief like ‘Thank God, I can lay here! I don't even have to get up since he's just going to drag me off!’.”

Macbeth is a play he’s always wanted to be in, Banderob says. Like me, he studied it in high school and fell in love with it then. They said it is “so gratifying” to finally play the Scottish king. “I never thought that this would happen to me,” Banderob confided.

Abbigale: Oh powerful Macduff played by Sweeny served graciously as the Scottish hero that earned cheers from unknown fans in the audience screaming “Eddyyy!” after his powerful deliverance of a grieving vengeance.

Evan: Yes, Eddy was great. I think it’s easy for Macduff to become a sort of broad Highlander-esque stereotype, and while Sweeney delivers the appropriate machismo when he declares that the Thane of Fife “was from his mother’s womb untimely ripped!” he never lets boistery cloud the pathos of the character.

Sweeney’s rendition of the “all my little chickens” speech especially comes to mind here, a passage to which he himself pointed when we spoke to him after the show. 

“That string of lines from Macduff has been in my top my favourite scenes in all of Shakespeare,” Sweeney told us. “It's the most intense scene I've ever had to act. And it's a favourite so I've just loved that scene every time, as hard as it is to do.”

Abbigale: Another thing I found particularly interesting about the casting was the amount of young actors gracing the stage, including the three witches played by Caileach Beaton, Alice Loeb, and Maeve O’Neill—all of which opened and closed the show in a quiet, yet daunting depiction of decay and rebirth in a desolate land. 

When catching up with the sisters afterwards, they remarked that being in a role which embraces weirdness (it’s in the name, afterall) was “interesting”.

“You can do whatever you want and no one will care because you’re weird anyways,” said Beaton. In addition, the actors shared that they fed off of each other’s weirdness in their performance which helped build their confidence on stage.

“It’s not that weird if you are being weird with other people,” said O’Neill.

Evan: I absolutely agree. The physical casting—not just of the Weird Sisters, but throughout—is so, so, so effective. David Geene’s Duncan towers over the rest of the cast, and it's really impactful that Macbeth is always literally looking up to other characters—to Duncan, to Macduff, and importantly to his wife.

The physicality to me is one of the best parts of the performance. The production uses the space really well, having actors enter from the crowd or take to the balconies when appropriate, and a lot of thought has clearly gone into using this big stage to its fullest potential.

Abbigale: I remember my excitement growing for the upcoming performance after seeing a video on First Friday Peterborough’s Instagram featuring the infamous Macbeth and Macduff battle. For some reason—perhaps my inexperience with plays—I assumed fake weapons would be used.

It’s safe to say I was pretty damn excited to see them in action. 

Sweeny holds the title “fight captain” for his steel choreography, sharing that he came into production later, but with over a decade of martial arts experience and a passion for  stage-fighting “looking good and feeling safe”, he was honourably bestowed this heavy crown. 

“Being in both of the major fights, it helps if one of the people really knows it,” he said, explaining that himself and Banderob had been working for an hour every rehearsal to get the fighting right. 

The gasps from the audience following the clash of steel and a developing Eddy Sweeny fan club are testament enough to the fact that they did, in fact, get it right. 

Evan: I’m really glad that the show seized the crowd in this way. At our dress rehearsal there were a couple of high school English classes seated in front of us—many of whose students clearly did not want to be there.

Raucous as they were to start, I think it's testimony to the quality of the performance that the players had the students cheering by the end of the show.

Abbigale: After the metaphorical curtains shut, Evan and I caught up with the co-directors to chat about the creative process behind this project, and the reasoning behind their specific adaptation. 

The adaptation for me is, as stated before, my only reference to the classic play (though I can imagine in its prime, the original version had fewer cowboy hats) and I can confidently say that I imagine it’ll be hard to top. The decaying black and white videography projected behind the stage that Loeb himself directed adds an impeccable sense of apocalyptic doom, in tandem with the striped wood and barren rocks across the stage. 

When asked about their decision to set the play in the aftermath of a climate disaster, Loeb stated that there are two speeches from the characters of Lennox and an unnamed Old Man that reference the politics surrounding the play’s murder, and its effect on the natural world. 

“We chose the play before we were starting to talk about [the setting], and we were like ‘Oh, that suddenly seems kind of urgent’,” he said. 

Continuing, he shared that they wanted to highlight the consequences of human action on the natural world, stating that “what people do have a bigger effect on the world, so we thought that would be a nice thing to pull out.”

Evan: I’m always inclined towards skepticism when a Director chooses to stage Shakespeare in a different setting. My parents have a notorious story about seeing a Hamlet adaptation in Stratford in which the main cast were all riding motorcycles.

That said, I think the ECP production pulls off its change of setting. It’s largely an aesthetic choice which doesn’t impact one’s enjoyment of the story. If anything the ambient music, droning as it is, is evocative of doom metal in a way that—paired with the ragged costuming—creates a keen sense of foreboding.

Oh, and the costuming is incredible. Lady Macbeth’s garbage-bag gown stands out in particular, but the prop of the Scottish crown—which looks like a wreath of antlers—quietly echoes the sense that nature is being perverted.

Abbigale: Barrow echoed her co-directors sentiments, stating that the age of the play offers a lot of creative freedom for directors. 

“Because the play was written so long ago, we had a lot of liberty as to how we wanted to tell this story: what we wanted to take in or take out,” she said. 

The two were enthusiastic about their passion for Shakespeare, with Loeb stating that directing this play felt like “collaborating with the text itself”, and Barrow sharing the decision behind adapting Macbeth was its shorter length, and its appeal to “a new generation.”

“This bloody tale with witches and sword fights—it’s a fun tale,” they concluded.

Tickets for Macbeth can be found at Markethall.org. The performance is running until May 25, 2024. 

Visit Electric City Players for more information on upcoming performances.