Macbeth

7.30 pm Wednesday 2^nd - Saturday 5^th June 2010
7.30 pm Wednesday 9^th - Saturday 12^th June 2010

Traquair House, Innerleithen, Peeblesshire EH44 6PW

Tickets: £12 (£10 concession)
Tickets and supper: £24 (£22 concession): Menu
Box Office: Eastgate Theatre Peebles, 01721 725777

Helpful-links
Eastgate Theatre & Arts Centre
Location and directions to Traquair House
Local accommodation - ReceptionBell.com

Please ensure that you arrive by 7.20 pm, to allow yourself time to walk to the start of the play. This is an outdoor promenade performance and you should wear sensible shoes and appropriate clothing.

• Further details about our production of Macbeth
• Macbeth and His Wife: how the husband and wife team directing this year's play are interpreting the Scottish Play
• The crucial contribution of children and youngsters to Shakespeare at Traquair
• Messing about at Macbeth

Rich Pickings in Peebles

June has arrived and outside this Tuesday morning is grey skies and persistent rain! Hey, ho! Beltane and Shakespeare at Traquair, both scheduled for the midsummer days, can never rely on the Borders’ weather.

However, the vast community project that is Shakespeare at Traquair had a splendid dress rehearsal on Monday evening with Macbeth. Matt Davies, as MacDuff, is poignant and outraged in his grief; Carol Norris as the elderly weird sister is deliciously strange and unsettling; David Bon as the man of few words is grotesquely cruel and sinister and Tom Hudson (Old Man) looks every bit the homeless hobo of the eleventh century. As for Lady Macbeth and Macbeth himself (Donna Vandenberger and Jacques Kerr) they are passionate and convincing as a pair of schemers who find their own scheming so unpalatable it ultimately destroys them.

Yet it is not the individual acting that impresses so much as the sum of the whole. The techies on this project (around 20 of them) quietly create costumes; strange make-ups, false beards, facial sores and blood-dripping gore; banquets to tempt a king and all manner of props fashioned out of plant pots and footballs into unrecognisable effigies. A team of stage managers from all walks of life (students, unemployed, full-time mums and university lecturers) run the entire grounds leaving props in place, arranging furniture and creating soundscape for the actors to effortlessly utilise to tell this gripping tale. The prompt (Rosemary Donald) has patiently and kindly coaxed the words along for weeks and now hopes to be redundant. And a group of women from Eddleston, and the Hope Group of St Joseph’s, knitted (whilst drinking wine) to ensure an army of men were kitted out for the event.

As a city girl, I moved here seventeen years ago, slightly apprehensive about village life and the prospect of there being little to do. How wrong can you be? The Peebles Arts Festival, the Innerleithen Music Festival, Tweed Theatre, Odd Productions, Music in Peebles and many more arts activities are all co-existing happily and fruitfully in this locality. The community spirit and creativity is boundless in this corner of the world.

Kath Mansfield June 2010

Macbeth runs from Wednesday to Saturday, 2-5 June and 9-12 June at Traquair House, Innerleithen. Tickets are £12 (£10 conc) and available from the Eastgate Theatre box office 01721 725777. Supper tickets are available on Friday and Saturday nights at £24 (£22 conc) for a two course supper plus coffee.