Review | A breathtaking Lady Macbeth from Hong Kong Dance Company – intense, ferocious, skilful
- Dance theatre work that begins where Shakespeare play ends is vastly different to anything troupe has done before, but they were up for it
Lady Macbeth, performed as part of the first Hong Kong International Shakespeare Festival, is a starkly powerful piece of dance theatre that takes a novel approach to its source material.
Created in 2018 by Italy’s imPerfect Dancers Company and choreographed by the company’s artistic directors, Walter Matteini and Ina Broeckx, it has been restaged in collaboration with Hong Kong Dance Company (HKDC), whose dancers performed it magnificently.
Lady Macbeth is not an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, but begins where the play ends. After their deaths, Macbeth and his wife find themselves in a kind of purgatory where they are forced to continually relive the events brought about by their actions when they were alive.
Full of highly charged emotion, it opens with Lady Macbeth desperately trying to wash her hands clean of blood – a direct reference to Shakespeare and a recurring action for both her and her husband throughout the piece.
The theme of blood is echoed in their costumes: glamorous evening clothes covered in bloodstains. They are haunted and tormented by four other characters: the three witches whose malignly deceptive predictions set Macbeth and his wife on their fateful course, and Banquo, the friend Macbeth has had killed to further his ambitions.
