Thrice

Thrice pushes Macbeth to the margins to put the witches at the centre of the story, recasting them as an ensemble of women persecuted for witchcraft. Yet the production gives surprisingly little shape to their persecution, or to the women themselves. We are invited to look beyond Shakespeare's mischievous agents of disorder and see the victims of a society that fears them, but the production offers little sense of who these women are or what distinguishes their experience. The change of perspective is clear enough, though what reveals it, perhaps less.

Smoke and eerie tones establish a suitably menacing atmosphere. A well and looming shapes surround an abandoned crown at the centre of the stage, while an opening dance sequence gathers an urgent rhythmic pulse. The crown eventually unfolds into a scythe, an arresting image that hints at significance without quite delivering it. Elsewhere, possessed pastoral tableaux have the peculiar stiffness of medieval animatronic figures. The ensemble seems perpetually caught between disciplined choreography and undirected chaos, never quite deciding which it wants to be. Shakespeare's rhyming passages are rearranged into tribal numbers, around call-and-response and collective chanting, but their new order and context remain oddly obscure.

That said, Thrice's rhythms do have a perverse appeal, but their words often seem chosen for their witchy sound rather than their dramatic force. As the performers strain to emphasise the language, voices pile up until the effect is less symphony than cacophony; much of what is said becomes unclear. There is an unfortunate irony in a production apparently intent on restoring the voices of persecuted women repeatedly drowning them out. There is ambition here, and the atmosphere, design and occasional flashes of movement make an impression. But Thrice repeatedly mistakes suggestion for meaning.

Thrice by Al Seed Productions. Credit Alberto Santos Bellido.