The Tragedy of Macbeth, Almeida Theatre, 1st October to 20th November
“A little later than now, in the ruins of a theatre, three witches make a prophecy. A warrior and his wife enter the darkness. A war begins.” Thus, the galvanic South African director Yaël Farber announces her intention of framing the action of Shakespeare’s most exciting tragedy as a “live” flashback. The unlovely Scottish couple are played by James McArdle and Saoirse Ronan, who appeared together in Francis Lee’s sulphurous movie Ammonite last year. Farber, who has masterminded sensational transformations of Strindberg’s Miss Julie and Lorca’s Blood Wedding, promises an elemental staging of power lust amid a whirlpool of dark and deep desires.
What If If Only, Royal Court Theatre, 29th September to 23rd October
Anything Caryl Churchill writes is formally inventive, structurally challenging and theatrically gnomic and tantalising. Her latest piece is just 14 minutes long and ponders, or posits, the question: if your partner has just died, could things have been different? Churchill’s husband of 60 years, the lawyer and campaigner David Harter, died earlier this year. The references won’t be literal or sentimental, but poetic and challenging. Linda Bassett and John Heffernan are the actors. The piece plays on the Court’s main stage in tandem with American playwright Aleshea Harris’s Is God Is, unrelated in its mission of twin siblings’ avenging their mother in the Californian desert.
The Lemon Table, Salisbury Playhouse, 14th to 23rd October, and touring
The flintily abrasive and acerbic Tony award-winning actor Ian McDiarmid—best known these days as the Emperor Palpatine in the Star Wars series—animates two connected stories in Julian Barnes’s The Lemon Table collection, reflections on mortality and the workings of love. The director is Michael Grandage, a long-time collaborator of McDiarmid, and the show tours after Salisbury to theatres in Sheffield, Guildford, Manchester and Malvern.
