10:35am Friday 23rd September 2011
DAVID Zezulka is playing Macbeth for the first time in Mooted Theatre Co’s production in York, but he knows Shakespeare’s Scottish play only too well.
“Twice I’ve been Banquo and once Ross, as well as numerous murderers and doctors – the delights of low-paid theatre,” says David, a Leeds-born actor of Czech descent who returned to Yorkshire a couple of years ago after seven or eight years in London, where he studied at LAMDA.
“I did Banquo at the Swan in Wycombe and the Bridewell Theatre in London and I was Ross in a really awful, horrible production in Hampstead, where the actor playing Macbeth had played for Torquay United, so it was his step from lower league football to lower league Macbeth.”
Now, like Macbeth, David has acquired the crown of roles. “I’ve graduated up to the senior one and it’s a pretty exciting change as you do realise it’s a much bigger task,” he says.
“It’s one of those parts that an actor measures himself against, like Hamlet or Richard III for dramatic actors,” says Mooted’s artistic director, Mark France, who first directed the play 14 years ago for the Brownsea Island Community Theatre in Poole Harbour.
“It was the first Shakespeare play I ever directed – I’d started acting at the Brownsea theatre in my school days – and you take things on board from shows and react against other things too.
“I was 24 last time and we were performing to 600 people a night with an enormous budget, a big cast, big set, big stage, broad swords and robes. So I’ve done Macbeth as a big production and thought I’d like to do a studio version now, but having said that, it’s impossible to do a small Macbeth as it grows and grows.”
Mark has ended up with a cast of 20 – he had 30 in 1997 – that will be performing a “more stylised, theatrically adventurous production that embraces physical theatre in way that was not in my repertoire when I started”.
In tandem with London designer Simon Jarvis, Mark has created a claustrophobic account of Shakespeare’s darkest tragedy, set in the First World War.
“The look we’ve gone for is one of faded opulence: if you can imagine a manor house that has become dilapidated through years of war, with sandbags and peeling paint. Our Macbeths are a little hard up,” says Mark.
“We want to present a world of perpetual warfare where people’s lives and decisions are informed by that situation. The Macbeths come to power from a context where there’s already a moral murkiness and there’s a country that’s being impoverished by a lack of food, jobs and money, and if you’re not a soldier, you don’t have a living.
“It’s a world of barbed wire and unexploded shells and our production is dark and brutal and murderous, which I think it should be because there isn’t anyone who isn’t in some way morally compromised. It’s a play that constantly has echoes in modern conflicts, whether in Serbia or now in Libya.”
Mooted Theatre Co’s Macbeth runs at 41 Monkgate, York, from Wednesday to October 8 at 7.30pm. Please note, there will be no performance of Macbeth on Monday, October 3. Tickets: £12, concessions £8, on 01904623568 or mootedtheatre.com
© Copyright 2001-2012 Newsquest Media Group
http://www.yorkpress.co.uk/trade_directory/