Reviewed by: Macbeth Gemma Kate Allred MacbethPresented by Playing Shakespeare with Deutsche Bank at Shakespeare's Globe, 2602– 1603 2020, and streamed via YouTube 1105– 2607 2020. Directed by Cressida Brown. Design by Georgia Lowe. Costumes by Laura Rushton. Music composed by Jon McLeod. Music Direction by Hilary Belsey. With Ekow Quartey (Macbeth), Elly Condron (Lady Macbeth), Jack Wilkinson (Macduff ), Samuel Oatley (Banquo), Aidan Cheng (Malcolm), Dickon Tyrrell (Duncan), Amanda Wright (Ross), Jessica Murrain (Lady Macduff/Witch 1), Molly Logan (Porter/Witch 2), Mara Allen (Fleance/ Witch 3), and others. Since 2007, Deutsche Bank has supported an annual Playing Shakespeare production at Shakespeare's Globe. Developed especially for schools, these productions run at around ninety minutes played without an interval, and are supported by workshops and online activities. The 2020 production— Macbeth, directed by Cressida Brown—did not finish its theatrical run due to COVID-19. However, a recording of the production was subsequently made publicly available via YouTube, offering wider access to a program that usually plays predominantly to organized visits by school audiences. To get a sense of numbers, 18,000 secondary school students were given tickets for free to see the 2020 production of Macbethin the theater; meanwhile the YouTubestream was, according to the Globe, viewed 471,500 times. The production was also in the rare position of being available both in the theater and online at different points during the COVID-19 crisis; it was also the last production I saw [End Page 164]in person before theaters closed worldwide. Revisiting Macbethonline, it's hard not to read the production in the context of ongoing concern over the wider political and societal response to the pandemic, raising as it does questions of effective and assumed leadership. Brown made a number of bold choices. She read Macbethas harboring a sense of inevitability: if Macbeth (Ekow Quartey) had not taken the actions he did, someone else would have. Brown sought to question the nature of tyranny, wanting to leave audiences with the sense of a societal fatal flaw: "the idea that tyranny is something that continues, it is not tied to a leader and you never know what regime you are going to be replacing with another" (Cuthbertson). Quartey's Macbeth was as much a victim of a flawed society as he was the agent of his own undoing. Lady Macbeth (Elly Condron), too, was portrayed sympathetically: heavily pregnant at the start of the play, the subsequent loss of her unborn child was as much a trigger for her madness as her involvement in regicide. Indeed, it was Lady Macbeth in the throes of miscarriage who warned Lady Macduff (Jessica Murrain) of her impending fate. There was a vulnerability within this production, with Fleance (Mara Allen) and Malcolm (Aidan Cheng) both portrayed as particularly childish. Parallels between Lady Macbeth's miscarriage and the murder of Lady Macduff's infant added a sense of a loss of innocence and a curtailment of any hope for the future. The sense of parallelism was present from the start of the play, with the witches offering prophecies for more than just Macbeth himself. As they disentangled themselves from a pile of dismembered bloody bodies, moving between the realms of the dead and the living, the witches foreshadowed the play's outcome. One (Allen) pulled a bloody dagger from her body as they introduced Macbeth; another (Murrain) held a damaged doll, a clear reference to Lady Macbeth's unborn child; whilst a noose around the third's (Molly Logan) neck hinted at the strangulation of Lady Macduff and the smothering of her child. There was a sense from the outset that this Macbethwas as much a commentary on society as it was on one man's "vaulting ambition" (1.7.27). Society was shown as damaged from the outset. Dirty, tattered Saltire flags bearing a "D" for Duncan motif were displayed around the theater, indicative of the poor state and strength of leadership. In contrast, Duncan (Dickon Tyrrell) appeared wearing a white suit and fur, the trappings of entitlement, a contrast to the bloodied fatigues of his soldiers who had been defending his...