Poppets spinning, bells tolling, drums beating. Things come in threes in Al Seed’s contemplative exploration of what happens after Macbeth. Nine barefoot women inhabit a strange, spectral world, their dresses spinning like bells, their bodies twisting and intertwining in a succession of often extraordinary tableaux. It is frequently beautiful, occasionally bewildering and sometimes, unfortunately, rather soporific.
As something of a Macbeth enthusiast, having once undertaken a marathon of productions at the Edinburgh Fringe and rarely allowing a Festival to pass without revisiting Shakespeare’s Scottish tragedy, I approached Thrice with considerable familiarity with its source material. Yet even that offered precious little assistance in navigating this post-Macbeth landscape. To describe the storytelling as abstract would be something of an understatement.
There is, of course, a fascinating historical dimension to the rehabilitation of Shakespeare’s witches. Scotland’s notorious witch trials were overwhelmingly directed against women, victims of a religious and patriarchal culture in which female independence could readily become evidence of diabolical intent. Here, the witches are multiplied threefold, reclaiming the stage through collective movement and ritual. It’s an intriguing premise, but one that doesn’t always translate into a coherent theatrical experience.
Visually, however, there is much to admire. The mirrored silver floor creates an extraordinary world of above and below, reflecting the performers and lending their movements an almost supernatural dimension. Overhead, peculiar, suspended sculptures of bound timber suggest crows, skeletal trees or the remnants of some ancient woodland. Zephyr Liddell’s costumes, in faded greys and muted reds, evoke a bleak, half-forgotten underworld.
Alberto Santos Bellido’s lighting is wonderfully atmospheric, while Guy Veale’s extraordinary soundscape provides much of the production’s emotional architecture. Bells, drums, rattles and percussive rhythms combine to create an unsettling auditory landscape, at times considerably more eloquent than the spoken word.
Indeed, the decision to leave the performers unamplified is questionable. Collective singing and speech generally work well, but individual passages frequently sound strained, with performers forced into a shout that sits uncomfortably against the delicacy of the visual imagery. Microphones might have allowed these voices to become a whispered, ghostly backdrop rather than an occasionally laboured contest with the soundscape.
Lina Limosani’s choreography provides the evening’s finest moments. Wooden sticks become percussive instruments, the rays of a rising sun and eventually the guns of soldiers. Their clattering against the floor or against one another creates moments of considerable dramatic intensity.
Most memorable is a sequence following a battle, when one dancer takes up a standard and moves bird-like among the fallen, high-stepping through the corpses in a macabre dance of death before a grotesque ballet sequence. Accompanied by a rattling score, and cawing crows it is exquisitely performed, a moment when movement, sound and imagery combine to communicate something profoundly affecting without the need for words.
Unfortunately, the production struggles to sustain this level of invention. A later sequence resembling a rather sleepy Orcadian Strip the Willow seems to continue long after it has exhausted its possibilities. Towards the conclusion, nine bodies move inwards and outwards like an advancing and retreating tide, accompanied by similarly hypnotic music. The effect is undeniably mesmerising, but, like the tide itself, it seems destined to return endlessly to where it began. Perhaps that is the point, but timelessness is rarely theatrically effective.
This is theatre concerned more with sensation than narrative, more with atmosphere than explanation. There is nothing inherently wrong with that. Abstraction can illuminate ideas that conventional storytelling cannot reach. But there is a distinction between ambiguity that invites interpretation and obscurity that simply leaves an audience adrift. At times Thrice crosses that boundary, becoming too bleak, too repetitive and insufficiently concise.
At one point the performers cry, “Alas, poor country, almost afraid to know itself.” It’s a line from Macbeth that might equally describe Thrice. For all its remarkable visual invention and moments of breathtaking physical expression, the production sometimes seems almost afraid to reveal what it is actually trying to say.
Reviewer: Greg Holstead
Reviewed: 23rd October 2026
Theatre Muse UK Rating : ***
Running time – 50Mins
