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by William Shakespeare, directed by Robert Lepage

Stratford Festival with Ex Machina, Avon Theatre, Stratford

May 28-November 2, 2025

Macbeth: “So foul and fair a day I have not seen”

Robert Lepage’s latest production of Macbeth is predictably heavy on visual design and light on textual insight. As with his production of Coriolanus at Stratford in 2018, Lepage seems to want Shakespeare’s play to look as much like a movie as possible. While some scenes look impressive, the actors’ performances range from adequate to sub-par. It is painfully clear that despite his expensive sets, Lepage has absolutely nothing to say about the play.

Lepage has directed Macbeth before. In 1992 he directed a student production for the Drama Centre at the University of Toronto. His concept for that show was based on Lady Macbeth’s exclamation, “Unsex me here”. Based on that, Lepage decided that all the men’s roles would be played by women and vice versa. The production did underline the fact that the play has very few roles for women and clearly linked Lady Macbeth with the Witches.

It turns out that Lepage had more of interest to say about Macbeth in 1992 than he does now. For the current Stratford staging produced in association with Lepage’s own company Ex Machina, Lepage has chosen a different concept. He has relocated the action to the Quebec biker wars in the 1990s. The wars are hardly an exact fit for the story of Macbeth since the biker wars were a battle between two rival factions over turf. In Macbeth the rebellious Thane of Cawdor is proclaimed defeated in the first few lines of the play. From that point on Macbeth is not about a battle over turf but the desire of one man and his wife to rise in a hierarchy of power.

Lepage’s production, in fact, begins with the drowning of the Thane of Cawdor when two men in a small boat tie his feet to concrete block and throw the man and block into the water. In a wonderfully eerie image Lepage shows the body slowly sink from above the proscenium to the stage floor where it vanishes.

The two main design features that give this Macbeth a look unlike any previous Macbeths you may have seen are the use of motorcycles on stage and the re-imagining of the Macbeths’ castle as a motel. The motor cycles are not gas-powered motorcycles but electric bikes disguised to look like gas motorcycles. John Gzowski’s soundtrack is needed to give them a threatening roar. The motel set comes in four two-storey pieces that can be linked together in various ways. Set up in a line, the four fill the stage space to become a reasonable facsimile of an average cheap motel. One room is the Reception, where the Porter is located, along with a neon “Vacancy/No Vacancy” sign (although we wonder why the sign is in English). Kitty-corner to Reception is the Macbeths’ room which looks just like any standard low-level motel room. We assume that the Macbeths own the motel because it is referred to as “their castle” and Lady Macbeth laments that Duncan was killed under “their roof”.

The set is most interesting when the four pieces are joined as a cube. Then it rotates clockwise allowing us to see the front of the building, the Macbeths’ bedroom, their bathroom, the Porter’s bathroom and then the Reception area. We learn such useless information from the set such as that Banquo and his son Fleance share the bedroom just above the Macbeths’ room. We also get to see that the room reserved for Duncan is just above Reception.

Macbeth is Shakespeare’s shortest tragedy, and yet, for this production, Lepage has cut swathes of dialogues and whole scenes. The reason is that he uses up so much time in repositioning the parts of the set and in having the motorcycles drive across the stage. After they appear in the first two scenes, we know that the characters are part of a motorcycle gang. But Lepage has the motorcycles repeatedly race across the stage to no purpose. Near the climax he has gang members pull up on the motorcycles and park in front of the motel. It’s realistic and well-choreographed but means nothing.

Similarly, once the motel set has been rearranged, Lepage seems obsessed with how people move from point A to point B. Scene after scene involves watching people open their door, close it, the set turns, they go to the next door, open it, close it and then speak to the inhabitant there. When there are stairs, Lepage wants us to see people go up and down them before they speak with anyone. We see the advantage of a bare Shakespearean stage immediately where there is no need to shift sets at all.

The most notable scene cut to make way for all this pointless to-ing and fro-ing is Act 4, Scene 2 when Ross visit Lady Macduff to advise her to flee. Before she can do so, Macbeth’s assassins kill her and all her children. As in all of Shakespeare’s plays from King John to Richard III to The Winter’s Tale, the death of a child due to the direct or indirect action of a king marks the nadir of the ruler’s reign and is a sure sign of his future downfall. All Lepage gives us in this production is Macduff’s reaction to the news of the killings.

The appearance and disappearance of the Witches and of Banquo’s ghost are well done by lighting a Mylar drop either from the front or from the back. But many other scenes are nonsensical. After Macbeth enters his motel room with bloody hands, he does not try to wash them but tries to shake the blood off all around the room. Lepage has assassins kill Banquo at a gas station. One douses the body lying near two fuel pumps with gas and standing near the body tosses a lit match onto it. Is he deliberately trying to kill himself or blow up the as station? We don’t know because Lepage immediately switches the scene (grotesquely enough) to the barbecue the Macbeths are hosting. When Malcom’s troops prepare themselves to attack Macbeth’s motel, Lepage wastes time showing us the troops hacking down trees. We later see the result of branches fixed to the handlebars of the motorcycles and it simply looks ridiculous.

What might redeem a play so focussed a visual concept would be great performances, but here none are to be found. Seasoned actors like Tom McCamus as Macbeth and Tom Rooney as Macduff fluff their lines leading to the inescapable conclusion that Lepage has spent far more time rehearsing the complicated technical aspects of the production than in rehearsing the text. Besides this, the actors are miked and when inside rooms or between drops making the sound boxy as if they were inside an aquarium. What is the point of the hyperrealism of the motorcycles and motel if the sound itself is not realistic?

McCamus’s Macbeth remains in the same disgruntled state throughout. McCamus’s delivery is flat no matter whether Macbeth’s fortunes are looking up or not. Rooney’s best moment comes in Act 4, Scene 3, when Macduff learns of his family’s murder. Rooney does well at conveying Macduff’s incomprehension, but not his grief. The final fight Anita Nittoly has arranged between Macbeth and Macduff is so pathetic, like two old geezers whose strength has long fled, that it is a mercy she has them go off stage to complete it.

Of the main characters the best performance of the evening comes from Lucy Peacock as Lady Macbeth. An inherent difficulty in setting Shakespeare amidst a biker gang is that the characters’ high level of discourse does not match their lower socioeconomic level. Peacock, however, because she speaks Shakespeare verse so naturally and because she is expert in communicating the meaning of his poetry, is able to make us focus on what Lady Macbeth is saying and not on the tarty way she’s dressed. This is not true of McCamus, who after his lines beginning “It will have blood, they say; blood will have blood. / Stones have been known to move, and trees to speak”, looks down at his biker outfit as if amazed that such a person as he could make such high-flown remarks.

Of actors in smaller roles Maria Vacratsis stands out as the Porter. The Porter’s famous speech is in 17th-century prose, but Vacratsis has a knack of making it sound absolutely modern. Unlike far too many Porters, she does nothing extra to make the role funnier but rather allows the humour to arise from the words themselves. One of Lepage’s better ideas is to give the Porter the lines of many of the characters at Dunsinane who make only one appearance, such as the unnamed Gentlewoman who accompanies the Doctor during the sleepwalking scene. Giving the Porter more lines helps make the figure more a part of the household.

Graham Abbey as Banquo, André Sills as Ross and Emilio Vieira as Lennox all give perfectly adequate performances although they have far fewer words than Macbeth to build a character.

Lepage has reimagined the Witches as diseased transvestite hookers. Aidan deSalaiz, Paul Dunn and Anthony Palermo are effectively creepy as they indulge in would-be seductive writhing undermined by their grimy, tattered attire. For Macbeth’s second visit to the Witches, Lepage has the good idea of having the Dunn and Palermo scrounge through dumpsters for the disgusting ingredients that deSalaiz adds to the open metal oil can that serves as their cauldron.

Lepage leaves in the often-cut testing scene of Act 4, Scene 3, where Malcolm portrays himself as a reprobate to discover whose side Macduff is on. This is a great scene for anyone playing Malcolm, but here Austin Eckert makes so little sense of what Malcolm is saying that his portrayal of the future king is completely ineffective.

Robert Lepage is known internationally as a great director. For that reason, many will want to see his latest work no matter whether it is good or bad. His visual conception of Macbeth is striking, although people should know that this is not the first time a play by Shakespeare has been set among biker gangs. Other productions relocating Shakespeare’s plays among biker gangs include the 2012 Milwaukee Rep’s Othello, Michael Almereyda’s 2015 film of Cymbeline, the RSC’s 2018 Mad-Max-like Troilus and Cressida and the Shakespeare on the Concho’s 2018 outdoor Macbeth.

If you go to a play by Shakespeare to see its sets and props, then Lepage’s Macbeth will be right up your alley. If you go to a play by Shakespeare to see actors master the greatest dramatic texts in English, then feel free to strike this Macbeth off your list.

Christopher Hoile

Photos: Tom McCamus as Macbeth, Anthony Palermo, Aidan deSalaiz and Paul Dunn as the Witches and Graham Abbey as Banquo; members of the cast on motorcycles; Lucy Peacock as Lady Macbeth; Tom Rooney as Macduff and Tom McCamus as Macbeth. © 2025 David Hou.

For tickets visit: www.stratfordfestival.ca