Shakespeare’s tragedy Macbeth is set to take the stage tomorrow and Sunday to mark the end of the 27th Macao Arts Festival, which began on April 30.
Macbeth will be presented by South African performance company Third World Bunfight in the form of an opera. It will be accompanied by a rewritten and adapted score from the original by Giuseppe Verdi. The score will be performed by an ensemble of ten South African opera singers, and the renowned trans-Balkan “No Borders Orchestra” conducted by Serbian conductor Premil Petrović.
During a meeting with local press yesterday, Petrović stated that the production is a condensed version of the classical story, focusing only on Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. “There are no side stories nor side personalities,” he said.
Petrović added that Macbeth is about power, greed, crime, and strategy.
Third World Bunfight’s adaptation of the Shakespeare classic will portray past and current events in contemporary Congo, with a group of refugee-performers expressing the tragic stories of a country where over six million people have died in the last 20 years as a consequence of conflict.
Macbeth’s cast pictured yesterday
Meanwhile Brett Bailey, the director of the production, stressed that he wanted to locate Macbeth within an African context, following similar productions of Medea and Orpheus.
“I imagined that opera as a nineteenth century architectural monolith […] lost in the forests or grasslands or Central Africa; a memento of a prior era, now crumbling, shot full of bullet holes […],” the South African artist said.
Bailey claimed that he has been aware of the catastrophe in the Eastern Congo for many years but the events have been little known by the rest of the world.
“It is striking to me that so few people outside of the region even know about it […] it is almost invisible,” said the director.
Bailey revealed that the troupe of refugee-performers had discovered an old trunk of paraphernalia [i.e., musical scores, costumes and such] from an amateur company that had performed Verdi’s opera in the region during the colonial period, stressing that it is a “fascinating link between the present situation and the horrors that were perpetrated in the name of profit by the Belgian administration.”
While Nobulumko Mngxekeza, the actress who plays Lady Macbeth, admitted that her character is a difficult role to interpret; she hinted that the play is “way too different from what they [the audience] know.”
According to the director of the play, the performers have a “desperate story to tell,” as tens of thousands of Africans who flock to Europe every year in small boats are seen as “problematic and nameless statistics.” Staff reporter
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