Blood and guts

Pan Pan's new production takes a daring approach to Shakespeare. Rosita Boland watches the dramatic results come to fruition

'We need more blood," says Andrew Bennett distractedly as he emerges from the messy business of murdering Banquo, lying prone in a glass-faced room at the back of the stage. "And we need it to be the glistening kind of blood," he says firmly.

It's the day before Pan Pan's production of Mac-Beth 7 starts previewing, and the absence of blood bags is just another item in a long list that the crew is making in this stop-start technical rehearsal.

Macbeth is one of the most regularly performed of Shakespeare's plays, which has both advantages and disadvantages. The audience's familiarity with a text and the shape of a play is always useful, but it also carries a potential disclaimer: if you've seen one Macbeth, well, you've seen a thousand. The challenge of making something new out of a text that has been around for centuries does not automatically make an interesting production. Also, any text that has had a life on a school curriculum stands a fair chance of being avoided ever after by those who studied it.

Pan Pan's production of Macbeth is in fact defined and inspired by its place as part of the educational canon: the play is set in a classroom, complete with textbooks, uniforms and schoolbags. "We were trying to come up with a strong setting and came up with the idea of the schoolroom environment," says Gavin Quinn, the play's director and Pan Pan's joint artistic director. The company first started working on the show 16 months ago.

"We wanted to give the idea of people wondering about Shakespeare, enjoying the lines, holding the sweets in your mouth that are lines from Shakespeare. We didn't want to perform this play as a museum piece. While having full respect for the text, we wanted to engage a modern audience."

The first scene the audience sees, as traditional, has the witches in the "open place" of the stage directions. The three women who slink silently out between the curtains are dressed in school uniform, with hooded coats, and clearly on the mitch. One is smoking. They huddle together silently, eventually spitting out their lines with the disdain particular to angst-ridden teenage girls. The hoods of their duffel coats echo the shape of witches' hats. One actress, Emma McIvor, is seven months pregnant, which makes the scene even more surreal. The sulky, huddled demeanour of the uniformed trio is eerily effective as the coven with their portents of doom.

Two rows of desks frame the stage, males on one side and females the other; the textbook open on each desk is Macbeth. The bell that rings to summon Macbeth to Banquo's chamber is the classic brass and wooden-handled school handbell. For the banquet scene, where Banquo's ghost appears, the desks are moved to form a long central bank of tables; the banquet is composed of Tupperware lunch boxes of juice and sandwiches. As a device, the schoolroom setting proves itself to be both imaginative and clever.

Although the play was not chosen with a potential school audience in mind, the show would be a terrific introduction to Shakespeare for any audience of school-going age. After its run at Project arts centre, in Dublin, Pan Pan hopes to tour the show, possibly next year, to festivals and venues abroad, before taking it around Ireland.

A technical rehearsal is just that: functional and technical. Every few minutes comes a pause to make lighting notes, costume notes, notes about pacing, cues, props, even the tempo at which the curtain is closed for the end of the first act. It's not a true reflection of the finished show. Even from a technical rehearsal, however, it's clear that Pan Pan's production of Macbeth has an element of the three-ring circus to it: there is something happening on stage everywhere you look.

The glass-sided room at the back of the stage is effectively another performance space. Even when the curtains are closed the audience can see what's happening inside via a digital camera that feeds into one of six screens banked up, towerlike, at the side of the stage. The other screens constantly change, telling five visual stories, their cameras focused on different desks where the actors are constantly placing objects under the cameras. Thus we see wiggling worms, bugs in container, scraps of text, scribbled writing, splayed hands.

When Banquo is murdered we see compasses being jabbed into hands, blood-stained bandages, the claws of dead birds. You could spend the entire show just watching the silent story being told on the bank of screens. It's ambitious and risky to have so much going on: with such a busy space there is a fine line between engaging and distracting the audience.

It's not unusual for actors to perform several roles within a play, but it is uncommon to see different actors taking turns at playing the same part. Macbeth, for instance, is played by four actors: Bennett, Ned Dennehy, Eugene Ginty and Dylan Tighe. "I think it makes the journey more interesting," Quinn says. "It gives you different interpretations of the role at different times. It's much more interesting to try things out, to experiment. And the actors learn from each other. It gives them an objectivity to the role when they see how other people play it in the same production."

The cast also includes the opera singer Nicola Sharkey - key parts of the text are sung - the dancer Katherine O'Malley and an eight-year-old girl, Drew Barnes, who is on stage throughout, drawing pictures. "The show is about the total poetic experience," Quinn says. "Music, imagery, movement, words: the total effect. Music can bring you somewhere spiritually that spoken words can't, to another level. We're trying to look at other forms of communication to tell the story. To tell the story in a surprising way. Pan Pan has been around for 11 years now and this production is a culmination of all our work as a company. You could say it is our flagship show."

Quinn sees Pan Pan's production as telling the story of Macbeth in two different and separate ways: visually and verbally. It could be argued that all theatrical productions aim for a layered examination of a text in which the interpretations fuse together into a whole. The difference is that Pan Pan, which has always approached its productions in a challenging way, seems literally to see its show as composed of different, quite specific components: shows within shows.

"The show is a piece of performance art by Gavin Quinn and we are all raw material," says Bennett during a break in rehearsal. "I've seen Gavin's productions before and liked them but never necessarily understood them," he adds, grinning. What marks Mac-Beth 7 out as a Pan Pan production? Bennett doesn't pause to think before replying: "General insanity."

Tighe adds: "One constant of all the shows is Gavin's approach to acting. At no point are we hiding the fact that we're just being ourselves. The authenticity of delivery is less to do with acting and more to do with the audience believing what we're saying." He draws a deep breath, then says: "It's brave and it's ambitious."

Mac-Beth 7 is at Project, Dublin, until April 24th