‘I get to play a king’: Women of colour take on war and masculinity in Macbeth

In 2014, Courtney Stewart played one of the witches in Queensland Theatre’s Macbeth – a big, old-school production with a largely Anglo cast and an imported British director, Michael Attenborough. And it got her thinking.

The witches are the ones who inspire the chaos with their prophecy “All hail Macbeth, that shalt be king hereafter!”. But they also represent the victims of war: the noncombatants, the onlookers.

“I always felt that the witches as a framing device in the story could be something that would be really interesting to dive into more fully,” Stewart says.

Something wicked this way comes: La Boite’s Macbeth stars Mel Ree, Roxanne McDonald and Nicole Hoskins.Credit: Stephen Henry

Now, as artistic director of La Boite Theatre, Stewart is co-directing a production of Macbeth, opening on International Women’s Day, that features only the three witches (Roxanne McDonald, Mel Ree and Nicole Hoskins). They tell the story, play all the parts, and look at this tale of white male ambition and violence from the perspective of three women of colour.

“Our bodies are often impacted the most by war,” says co-director and designer Samoan-Australian Lisa Fa’alafi. “So it’s interesting to take a text written by a white man, and what it means, [and hear it] out of our mouths.”

“Shakespeare did have men playing women,” says McDonald, referring to the fact women were banned from Elizabethan stages, “so we can have the women playing the men!”

Nicole Hoskins and Mel Ree as the regicidal Macbeths. Hoskins is a Queensland-trained Filipino actor and Ree is a Papua New Guinean actor, dancer and poet.Credit: Stephen Henry

Stewart says the play has incredible urgency at a time when the news tells of massacres in Ukraine and Gaza.

“Macduff has that line, ‘Each new morn, new widows howl, new orphans cry, new horrors strike heaven on the face’. And that, to me, speaks so deeply about all the conflict we’re seeing at the moment.

“[Women] are the ones who are often left to try and sew society back together, you know. I think we’ve kind of recast the witches as healers.”

Macbeth is one of Shakespeare’s most accessible plays: relatively short, easy to follow, and full of memorable lines.

Multi-award-winning actor Roxanne McDonald has Australian Indigenous, Chinese and Scottish heritage.Credit: Stephen Henry

It even has a strong female role in Lady Macbeth, who convinces her husband to murder the Scottish king, only to lose her mind in the process.

But it’s still arguably a hypermasculine text, full of sound and fury, as film adaptations by Roman Polanski, Justin Kurzel, Joel Coen and Akira Kurosawa demonstrate.

Co-directors Courtney Stewart and Lisa Fa’alafi.Credit: Stephen Henry

Retelling the tale from a feminine, non-white perspective forces audiences to hear famous lines of dialogue in a whole new way.

“The word ‘man’ comes up a lot,” says the play’s dramaturg, former La Boite artistic director Sue Rider. “Because it’s three women who are saying it, even in the character of a man, it just makes you think about what that means again.”

Fa’alafi engaged Papua New Guinean master weavers to help build the set using “bilum” weave.

“Bilum weave is something women use to carry their babies – bilum means womb – and we’re using it to transform the space, to show women’s work, which is integral across Asia-Pacific cultures.

“It symbolises women’s cycles, and the cycle of this story, which continues to play out – the women who have seen this story over and over again.”

The youngest cast member, Nicole Hoskins, can’t quite believe she is part of this production and is getting to play Lady Macbeth. “I feel like I’m floating, it’s amazing being in this room,” she says.

But then Mandandanji, Wangan and Darumbal woman McDonald, a multi-award-winning actor and local theatre treasure, is also pinching herself.

“Coming into this as a First Nations person, it would never have happened when I first started performing in the arts. I get to play King Duncan! There’s that beautiful Shakespearean language I get to speak.

“It sort of resonates with me as well because there were lots of land wars, tribal wars, between Aboriginal nations. War is war, and killing is killing.”

In addition to Aboriginal and Chinese blood, McDonald has Scottish heritage on both sides of her family. “We found out where we were from on the McDonald side – County Renfrewshire, Edinburgh.

“So then I think, my God, I’m doing this play and, you know, that’s my mob there!”

La Boite’s Macbeth plays at the Roundhouse Theatre from March 6-22.

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