Director's Note:
Why does Macbeth still feel so immediate?
Part of the answer lies in how Shakespeare treats ambition—not as something distant or abstract, but as something intimate, physical, and dangerously seductive. Macbeth is not driven by fate, but by imagination: the ability to see himself crowned, to feel it, to taste it—before it ever exists.
And once he can imagine it, he cannot unknow it.
In this production, we’ve leaned into the speed of that transformation. The play moves with a kind of terrifying momentum—thought becomes image, image becomes desire, desire becomes action. There is almost no space between them. Decisions are made in a breath, and the consequences arrive before anyone has time to fully understand what they’ve done.
The supernatural world—the witches, the visions, the prophecies—is not something separate from Macbeth, but something that speaks directly to what is already alive inside him. They do not force his hand. They give shape to his hunger. The danger is not that he is tempted—it is that he recognizes himself in what they offer.
There is also, in our telling, a sense that something has already been lost. A future that will not come. A lineage interrupted. In that absence, ambition becomes unmoored—no longer tied to legacy or continuity, but to the immediate, the urgent, the now.
At its core, Macbeth is not a play about destiny. It is a play about choices—and about how quickly a single choice can become a chain of them.
And once a thing is done, it cannot be undone.
James Ricks
Director
