Fair is foul and foul is fair. Goblin: Macbeth comes to the Citadel Highwire Series

By Liz Nicholls, .ca

“I’d only ever say this in Edmonton,” declares the amused voice on the phone. “Blame Mark Meer!”

To help support .ca YEG theatre coverage, click here.  

If that Edmonton actor/improv star with the encyclopedic knowledge of action figures, fantasy lore and wizardly disguises, immersive games (and more) had never shown Rebecca Northan shots of silicon goblin masks created by the specialty company Composite Effects — who did all the background masks for Game of Thrones among other imaginative ventures — we might not be seeing the (very) original version of Macbeth, acted by goblins, that opens Thursday in the Citadel’s Rice Theatre.

The moment she caught sight of the fateful silicon masks Northan was inspired: “Oh, those masks could do Shakespeare!” She showed the pictures to Bruce Horak, her fellow improviser and Spontaneous Theatre creative partner. “Don’t you think they’d do Shakespeare? ” Horak’s instant response: “Well, obviously.”

A play was born in the thought —  a production that that’s about to add an engagement in the Citadel’s Hotwire Series to hot-ticket held-over runs in Vancouver (Bard on the Beach), Toronto (Tarragon), Stratford, and Calgary (Vertigo Theatre).

Three curious goblins, who’ve stumbled on the Complete Works of Shakespeare, decide to try theatre, that weird and wonderful human pursuit, by doing the bloodiest play they can find in the canon of humanity’s star playwright. There’s an experimental artistic hook for Northan and Horak, too. “As soon as you say you’re gonna do Hamlet, Richard III, or Macbeth, everyone asks who’s playing the lead character. They want to pre-judge the performance…. Well, what if you didn’t know who was playing the lead?”

“Maybe you would just listen to the text in a whole new way if the spotlight was taken off the real-life persona of the artist, allowing them total freedom to disappear, and sending people back to the play.  And I think Goblin: Macbeth does that.”

Macbeth isn’t Spontaneous Theatre’s first rendezvous with the Bard. In Undiscovered Shakespeare, slated for a Stratford Festival run until the world’s fateful meet-up with COVID in 2020, Northan and Horak solicited a personal story from an audience member, and improvised the play, all in iambic pentameter, that Will somehow didn’t get around to writing.

Kragva, Moog and Wug in Goblin: Macbeth, Spontaneous Theatre at the Citadel. Photo supplied

Beyond the gore and the dark allure of a Shakespeare play where three witches get memorable stage time, and arguably call the shots, why Macbeth, of all the plays in the canon? “Originally a Goblin: Hamlet was floating in our minds,” says Northan, last in Edmonton with Undercover, an “improvised crime” detective thriller at the Citadel in 2018. But then, fate did one of its showbiz interventions. At the last-minute The Shakespeare Company in Calgary lost a two-hander Macbeth to COVID. And Spontaneous Theatre spontaneously stepped up to this theatrical emergency, “the bonus being that over the years Bruce and I have actually worked on Mackers multiple times.”

Northan remembers the breathless scramble to opening night that followed. The price tag for three Composite Effects masks was $3,000 Canadian; “do we have that? no we don’t, so what do we do?” Enter Spontaneous Theatre’s anonymous super-fan, who bought the masks. By the time these were fashioned by the Louisiana-based company, the time line was crazily foreshortened. In an apotheosis of adrenalized spontaneity, Northan and Horak, with Ellis Lalonde (the musician of the piece), put it together in eight days, Zooming in from Montreal, Calgary and the U.S. “We had not done a full run with those crazy masks on till we had our first audience,” says Northan, still amazed at the memory. “I turned to Bruce just before we stepped onstage and said ‘are we about to humiliate ourselves?’ He said ‘maybe’.”

Goblin: Macbeth, Spontaneous Theatre. Photo supplied.

You could almost call ‘the Scottish Play’ (as theatre superstition prefers calling it) a recurring theme, full of sound and fury (and fun) for them. “The breadcrumbs of our own careers have really led us to this place,” says Northan cheerfully. There have been “truncated versions” with elementary and junior high school kids in assorted school residencies with Calgary’s Quest Theatre. Northan herself, who’s been based in Stratford for the last six years, has twice directed “comedic versions” of Macbeth with Calgary’s improv company Loose Moose, and in Toronto. And because all three members of the cast are improvisers, “we give ourselves permission to surprise each other onstage every night.”

They’re dealing with a playwright who is particularly elastic-sided and open to off-side inspirations. “The plays are so well-written, the structure is so solid, they can really withstand a lot of jumping up and down and kicking, a lot of re-arranging and cutting, because the bones are so solid.” As its name suggests, Spontaneous Theatre is always in cahoots with their audience. “Always!” says Northan emphatically. In Blind Date, for example, which played the Citadel a dozen years ago, Northan as the red-nosed French clown Mimi has been stood up by her date — and finds another a replacement in the audience, for the entire show. In Legend Has It, an audience volunteer becomes the hero of the story.

“In comparison with other Spontaneous shows where we bring one person up onstage to be the star, Goblin: Macbeth is “audience participation lite,’ as Northan puts it. “You can participate, or not, from your seat as a group.” Audiences at Stratford filled up with blue-collar locals, plus “the young and the drunk,” as the buzz grew during the 2023 run at the festival. At Toronto’s Tarragon this past fall, the entire run sold out and got extended before the first performance. And the staff, ensconced in the office above the theatre, reported that the rock concert screaming of the matinee school audiences was so loud they couldn’t work during performances.

In the world of goblins, there’s no fourth wall, which is to say, there’s no self-contained stage world into which we peer. The goblins know we’re there. “Goblins,” says Northan, “are very much cousins of Mump and Smoot,” those bouffon horror clowns from the planet Ummo. “Both Bruce and I trained with Mike and John,’’ Mump and Smoot’s alter-egos Michael Kennard and John Turner, from time to time at the latter’s Clown Farm. “In the world of mask and clown, we all swim around in the same pond. In that world, pretending there’s a fourth wall is a lie. And goblins can’t lie…. We’re all here in a theatre together: we see you, you see us.”

Wearing a face-fitting silicon mask is, says Northan, “a liberation in itself, not dissimilar to a clown nose … something about obscuring your own face that gives you permission to open other doors in your personality.”

“Goblins don’t really understand theatre as a process,” says the actor/director, a mentee of the great improv guru Keith Johnstone of Theatresports fame. “They’re trying it for the first time. And it’s weird. Sometimes they break out of the text to work things out in the moment.” Northan, Horak and their third cast-mate (and the show’s musician) Ellis Lalonde are all improvisers. It’s one of their artistic tenets, she says, that “we have to be so good at speaking the text we earn the right to break out of it and misbehave. And we have to be able to jump back in at any time with total proficiency.” If this sounds crazy difficult, Northan says it is. “It gives your neurological pathways a real challenge.”

So, how on earth did goblins become Shakespeareans anyhow? “We’ve always tried to avoid you humans,” says Northan of her fellow goblins. “Then we discover Shakespeare, and hey, this guy seems to know a lot about our world — witches, goblins, fairies…. So if he knows that much about us maybe we could learn about you by giving it a shot.”

The goblins seem to have developed a taste for the classics. They’ve already unleashed Goblin: Oedipus at last year’s High Performance Rodeo in Calgary, with dates to come in October at Stratford. “We joke we’re building a goblin empire,” says Northan. “Bruce wants to do a goblin Christmas Carol!”

Meanwhile “we’re having a good time!” says Northan. “None of us of us thought that in our 50s we’d be running around with silicon bags on our heads.” And there’s no such thing as a bad hair day. “It’s great! I never want to show my face onstage again!”

PREVIEW

Goblin: Macbeth

Citadel Highwire Series

Theatre: Spontaneous Theatre

Created by: Rebecca Northan and Bruce Horak, with Ellis Lalonde

Starring: Kragva, Moog, Wug

Where: Citadel Rice Theatre

Running: Jan. 11 to Feb. 2

Tickets: citadeltheatre.com, 780-425-1820