What is that Zombie doing in Shakespeare

A colleague asked me if our production of Macbeth was really Shakespeare’s Macbeth. I understood the question because we had been using our zombie concept to help sell tickets to students. I assured him that it was really Macbeth and that he would surely recognize the play. He clarified his question a little, noting that Shakespeare did not include zombies in the play.

It is a logical question. While there is a great deal of darkness and murder in the play, the word zombie never appears in the script.

Shakespeare was no stranger to the occult, of course. Many of his plays include witches or seers or other such mystical characters. Many Londoners of Shakespeare’s time would have been true believers in this sort of thing. In Macbeth, Shakespeare includes three witches who, as written, seem to lay down the archetype for our current Halloween witches with their enchantments and boiling cauldron. These witches are an important part of the plot and lay down a great deal of the exposition.

Orson Welles once directed a famous production of the play that came to be called the “Voodoo” Macbeth. Welles chose to set the play in Haiti and turn the witches into voodoo priests and priestesses. Some think the actors were actual practitioners of voodoo and often cast real spells and curses on members of the company and audience as part of the play.

It is a short leap for us, then, to include the concept of zombies in our production. Many of the scenes are very dark, several characters are killed during the course of the action, one in particular seems to come back to life after having been killed onstage, and of course there are those crazy witches. It just seemed to us that even Shakespeare might include zombies if he was writing the play today.

Once we set the concept, many of the other pieces fell together rather nicely. Choices regarding lighting, sound, music, movement, scenery, and costumes became exciting and obvious. The concept is not a reworking of the play itself but rather a vehicle for telling the same story Shakespeare told 400 years ago.

Don’t expect a lot of changed lines or reinterpretation just because there are a couple of zombies hanging around. The play is still Shakespeare’s script; we made some cuts for length but made no changes for meaning. You should easily see the play for what it is: a straight-forward cautionary tale about lust for power.