“THINGS BAD BEGUN, MAKE STRONG THEMSELVES BY ILL”

“It moves upon the verge of an abyss, and is a constant struggle between life and death. The action is desperate and the reaction is dreadful... The whole play is an unruly chaos of strange and forbidden things, where the ground rocks under our feet. Shakespeare’s genius here took its full swing, and trod upon the farthest bounds of nature and passion.”

Witchcraft, ambition, tyranny, warfare, murder and madness. The story of the ambitious Thane and his wife, and their bloody rise to power, is one of Shakespeare’s best-known, most quoted and adapted plays.

In this pared-down version, first and second-year actors join to perform the “Scottish Play” as a ritual of possession and catharsis, and explore how evil can spring from ambition and power destroys both an individual and the society they rule.