A Macbeth Like No Other: Haunting New Production Transforms King’s College Chapel

Eva Lemmy’s production of Macbeth opens on Thursday in King’s College Chapel. The chapel isn’t a venue on CamDram. While there was a Beckett installation there in 2015, and some Beckett shorts in 2021 (bit of a trend), to stage a play of this scale is massively out of the norm. Eva agrees: ‘I don’t think this is going to see a precedent be set. The chapel has made it clear this is a one off.’ In other words, this is a truly singular event. 

Courtesy of the production team.

I visited rehearsals to catch up with Eva and the cast to get a sense of their ambitions and hopes for their project. Eva describes her production as layering the tone of the 2012 film adaptation of The Woman In Black, starring Daniel Radcliffe, onto the aesthetic of an Elizabethan chapel. 

In 1564, students of King’s College would perform plays for Queen Elizabeth I. This is the heritage Eva seeks to tap into, one of chapels as ritualised performance spaces, and from the sounds of it, not in a postmodern way but with absolute sincerity. ‘Macbeth is my favourite Shakespeare’, Eva tells me, having received 75 or her first year Macbeth coursework on ‘knocking and noise’ in the play. By staging it in the chapel, she has been grappling with the meaning of justice in the play, and how, by doing it in such an overtly religious space, these questions are physically recontextualised. I learn that, as part of this, her production is interested less in answers than in provoking a conversation, a dialogue between its audience and onstage action.

From its conception, she has described her production as ‘traditional’. I ask her what this means - is there such a thing as a ‘traditional’ production? Eva suggests her interest is in authenticity and conviction, allowing the interaction with the space, a space which is as old as the play itself, to provide a new perspective on the text. The venue is the concept. I ask if she can be more specific about this, and she tells me that the production is centred around the psychological space of the chapel as a protective space from evil, asking what it means to bring dark thoughts into a room defined by its serenity and peace. From this perspective, it sounds as if the production is as interested in challenging the space as it is embracing it. The production is set in the candlelit grand hall of Macbeth’s castle, and, as if we, the audience, are Duncan arriving for the evening, overawed by the majestic self-fashioning of the Macbeths.

Esther Welbrock, a third year HSPS student at King’s, is playing Lady Macbeth. She tells me the production is not trying to do anything radical as much as let the play and setting speak themselves, and see how the two interact. She muses on the fact that her friends who are coming to see the play already know the story, and says that the production has a few tricks up its sleeve to make an audience shocked about things they already know are going to happen. She reflects on reading Macbeth for her GCSEs and says, ‘I think when I was in school I thought Lady Macbeth was a very cool character. But now I have more sympathy for her. It’s a very ironic play, and she’s a character forced to manage so many ridiculous scenarios’.

Macbeth is Alfie Penfold, a second-year English student at King’s. He says he wants an audience to prepare for terror. He thinks that the production encourages this because of its simplicity. ‘Sometimes productions try to be a bit too weird. I think you just need to stand up and speak the monologue, and the audience will produce something in their own minds that wraps them up’. By encouraging interior reflection and thought over spectacle and intellectual intervention, he hopes the production will rattle audience members. 

The cavernous space, moreover, contrasts boldly with the intimacy of the production, where audiences will be at most three rows from the audience. A third of the audience make up the front row. The audience can’t hide, are rendered alert and visible and exposed. Esther tells me, ‘I want to act with the audience, rather than just at them. In my soliloquies, I move between imagining I’m speaking to a mirror and speaking to an audience directly. It’s a really exciting set of choices that I get to make every night. 

Alfie sees the intimacy of the space as being important for there being ‘two plays within Macbeth, one of which is mystical, and one of which is domestic. He suggests that the two fuel each other, and that rehearsals have been a process of negotiating these two poles within one intimate space. ‘Maybe the two poles intersect at the murders’, he suggests.

Eva, an ADC producing stalwart, is directing for the first time, and tells me she feels liberated from the conventions of the ADC. I ask her how she would describe herself as a director. She tells me her interest is in movement, pace, and energy. She wants it to be a speedy and intense whiplash of a show, forever on the verge of the next jump-scare, mediated by her assistant, Charlie McGuire, who balances out Eva’s verve with a slower, more character-based approach 

She tells me the biggest swing in the production is its original music for string quartet, written by Jack Robinson, and which takes a surprisingly large role in the play’s storytelling. 

So, I ask her - what should the audience be thinking about as they watch the play to get the most out of it? Eva encourages us to ‘pay attention to how lightness is a force for good’. She is interested in physicalising her moral perspective on the play.

Reflecting on what she’s most proud of, she waxes lyrical (not for the first time in our meeting) about how her company has enabled her original idea’. Her small group has grown and grown, gathering more and more team members through effort, time, and hard-work. The rehearsals have been ‘full of love, trust, and a sense of community’, with Eva saying ‘it has really helped grow our love of Kings and what it means to be a part of that community. We have cast members from 5 different year groups - when else would we all come together?’. Esther, similarly, tells me ‘I love the fact that I have an allocated time slot every day to think about literature’. In this play about paranoia and ruthless ambition, this company seems to have found great harmony.