Macbeth, absolute battlefield legend, is chillin’ with his BFF, Banquo, after a major dub. They just vibin’. Out of nowhere, three crusty witches pop up. Wassup king-to-be? You’re about to glow up big time but heads up: Banquo’s kids are also gonna be kings. So Macbeth slides into the DM of his wife….

San Francisco: If Macbeth were to be turned into a video game by a Gen Z team, they would have explored themes like power and gender, besides language. For the first time the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) is stepping in to deliver a video game version.

Titled Lili, the game is being developed in collaboration with iNK Stories, a New York-based indie studio and publisher that also made 1979 Revolution: Black Friday. The play is being reimagined as an interactive video game with a neo-noir vibe and the
developer is calling it a “screen life thriller video game”.

Slated for release later this year, the game features 2022 Cannes best actress winner Zar Amir Ebrahimi (for Holy Spider) as Lady Macbeth, aka Lili.

Lili is set in a “stylised, neo-noir vision of modern Iran, where surveillance and authoritarianism are part of daily life”, according to the developer.

Everyone is under surveillance while the gameplay melds live-action cinema with an interactive format, allowing players to make choices that will decide Lili’s destiny. The witches, instead of going “double, double, toil and trouble/ Fire burn, and cauldron bubble”, have been reimagined as hackers, and surveillance cameras and cyber-infiltration tools will take players deep into the storyline.

The modern twist on the classic story explores themes of “technological domination, the manipulation of information, and institutional violence”. The video game is radical because of the focus on Lady Macbeth rather than her husband.

Sarah Ellis, the RSC’s director of creative innovation, told the PA news agency that she was “delighted” to be adapting the play to “reach gamers and audiences of the future”. Emma Smith, an RSC board member and a leading Shakespeare academic, called the game “both utterly Shakespearean and radically defamiliarised”.

Another Shakespearean play that recently found itself in a video game-inspired setting is Hamlet. In 2020, British actor Sam Crane was cast as Harry Potter in the Harry Potter and the Cursed Child on London’s West End. A few days into rehearsals, the pandemic played spoilsport. He found his friend and fellow actor Mark Oosterveen playing Grand Theft Auto Online, a game that took the GTA franchise online in a vast multiplayer world.

Anything can happen in GTA Online — robbing banks to racing cars. In the game, Crane and Oosterveen came across a giant open-air theatre where they would play Hamlet. It has resulted in the documentary Grand Theft Hamlet, directed by Crane and Pinny Grylls, and shot entirely inside Grand Theft Auto.

Last year, theatre director Seamus Miller reimagined Shakespeare’s Roman warrior Coriolanus, played by James Finley, as a figure in an action-adventure video game.