There is nothing sombre about Shakespeare, however grim his play. The Royal Shakespeare Company has proved this by making a “screen life thriller video game” of Macbeth in collaboration with iNK Stories, the makers of 1979 Revolution: Black Friday. The game is set in a stylised version of Iran, amid surveillance and authoritarianism. It is a modern neo-noir setting, with live-action cinema and an interactive format, where Lili, the eponymous heroine and the avatar of Lady Macbeth, must have her fate decided by the players. Among the radical shifts creatively achieved, this is one of the biggest. Shakespeare may have inclined towards his villainous hero for the name of his play, but the game finds Lili the appropriate character for the name. A version of Hamlet had emerged earlier, but entirely within Grand Theft Auto Online. But Lili is so far the grandest of thefts, something that Shakespeare would have heartily approved of, no doubt.
Aimed at Generation Z and others in the future who would creep unwilling to school at the prospect of a Shakespeare class, the horrors of Shakespeare’s sinister, blood-soaked play are shifted to the plane of a technological dystopia. The witches, on whose appearance directors through the ages expended so much creativity and creepy imagination, are hackers in the Macbeth game. Its world is eerily closer to the world familiar today, with technology rampant, information being manipulated and institutional violence. The game will use surveillance cameras and cyber infiltration tools as means by which the choices about Lili’s life will be made. Lili is played by Zar Amir Ebrahimi, the2022 best actress award winner at Cannes for the film, Holy Spider. By estranging the setting and shifting the theme, the game would bring out the universal quality of Shakespeare’s story, making it applicable to other times and other spaces.
Shakespeare in his day was the highest entertainment; his plays ranged from high jinks and merrymaking to profound sorrow, thundering speeches, bloodshed, madness and death. Directors have through the years interpreted the plays for the stages of their times, trying to bring alive their spirit. The RSC’s decision is dramatic: the choice of an entirely new medium for Macbeth where there is no audience but only gamers. This is a new thrillbut the triumph is Shakespeare’s. It is his work that has inspired such creativity and it is his work that is being poured into a new mould without losing its lineaments. If this begins a trend, perhaps other plays could lend themselves to such entertaining treatment. A Midsummer Night’s Dream, for example, could do wonders with its fairies and the gullible Bottom, perhaps even better than Hamlet’s ghost. The Tempest could be perfect for a modern rendering with Ariel and Caliban as human figures in a dystopian fable. Shakespeare opens the portals to creativity.
