Double Double Biker Trouble

Patricia Keeney*

Macbeth. Opened May 2, 2025 at the Stratford Festival of Canada. Seen August 28, 2025. Directed and designed by Robert Lepage. Featuring Tom McCamus as Macbeth, Lucy Peacock as Lady Macbeth, David Collins as Duncan, Graham Abbey as Banquo. Bikers, picnic guests, bodyguards and others played by members of the company.

Under cover of darkness, a motorboat rumbles slowly across the stage. Its hooded prisoner is unceremoniously dumped overboard along with a cement block. Down, down he goes amidst bubbles of breath. Up come screen credits as in a movie theatre.

What we are watching is a fearless example of director’s theatre from the internationally-acclaimed Robert Lepage. For this production of Shakespeare’s Macbeth on the main stage at Canada’s prestigious Stratford Festival, however, he has stranded us in violence-filled 1990s biker gang Montreal and stuck us in a cheap two storey motel.

Tom McCamus as Macbeth and Lucy Peacock as Lady M. weaving the sexual/political web that will undo them both. Photo: David Hou

Lepage seems to be making a film, sizing his Macbeth to fit another medium entirely, moving around large chunks of text, ignoring others. All we are missing is the popcorn.

Add to this odd iteration the weird sisters who appear lasciviously and fascinatingly as gender fluid millennial vamps. Raggedly in-your-face, they mock-hail the unsuspecting Macbeth with treasonous enticements.

Superbly embodied in spite of the concept by Stratford veteran Tom McCamus, Macbeth blows in full of valour and honour. Swaggering with success this returning hero is a true biker champion alive with the vigour of victory for his gang. Animated by the triumph of his successful soldiering, his jean and leather-jacketed wife Lady Macbeth embraces him in their tacky motel home. Lady M. is underplayed throughout by Lucy Peacock, a fine actor who has significantly scaled down her performance to fit this biker world and its suffocating surroundings.

Lucy Peacock’s Lady M. in existential angst. Photo: David Hou

High on themselves, husband and wife spar here like ripe young animals. She whispers treachery to him. Kill the biker king and claim his crown for us.

No doubt there is cleverness in Lepage’s motorcycles and motel concept. “No Vacancy” lights flash on and off at strategic points in this vicious story to the rumble of carefully choreographed motorcycles multiplied in space by dark mirrors behind the action. And the motel literally moves, opening and closing, carrying us from one cramped room to another—closet spaces filled with spy cameras and hidden microphones. Occasionally, Lepage’s image-making wizardry revs into overdrive: gas pumps switch to barbeques for the truth-telling banquet scene that undoes our hero. It is set, picnic style, on a long wooden table, expanded menacingly by the mirroring.

This feast is designed to calm those who have already carried out their leader’s homicidal instructions by ruthlessly eliminating other pretenders to the biker throne. The apparition of Macbeth’s assassinated rival is mirrored multiple times and as quickly disappears. The terrifying vision fells Macbeth embodying all his guilt and remorse. He raves against his wife’s acid hiss: “Sit down…. You have displaced the mirth.”

By this time even the talented McCamus seems to choke on the words. The valiant efforts of his gravel-sure voice simply cannot free magnificent language from the prison of its curious concept. Shakespeare’s words do not resound, they merely echo, bouncing off the walls of a tawdry little abode, constantly zinging against the odd angles of this production. In the end, the play’s imagination too often fights with the restrictions of set and cycles. The language is strangled. Shakespeare’s text is replaced by the visual text of juddering motors and toking gang members who recount events, like a Greek chorus, sans any real sense of fate.

Paul Dunn, Aidan deSalaiz and Anthony Palermo as the weird sisters stirring up trouble. Photo: David Hou

Lepage has claimed he is not modernizing the play but rather emphasizing the timelessness of its despotic hero by contextualizing it so that Macbeth’s political relevance to modern dictators might be better understood. Unfortunately, the directorial vision simply becomes a puzzling distraction seriously reducing the essential power of the original work. Nor does this odd vision actually connect to the realistic and illicit side of biker gangs with their murderous drug-dealing bravado. What Lepage offers up in this Macbeth is simply a world of violence and toxic masculinity adding up to very little.

For me, Macbeth is a play about unbridled greed and lust for power driven by a vaultingly ambitious woman. It is Lady Macbeth who actually creates the play’s core toxicity driving her husband to murderous acts. Unfortunately in this production, Lady Macbeth is mostly missing.

Lepage has proven himself a master of director’s theatre. His recent Hamlet, for instance, reimagined the play’s pivotal moments through dance. His 2018 Coriolanus for Stratford successfully fused Shakespeare’s most political play with contemporary technology—guards sending messages to one another via cell phones as one example. (I reviewed both these productions in earlier editions of this journal.) And most spectacularly, there was his 1996 Hamlet in which he himself played all the roles using kaleidoscopic technology to convey Hamlet’s “internalized perspective.” These worked. They respected the essence of each play.

But here all is reduced. We see Lady Macbeth scrubbing furiously at her hands in a tiny bathroom while the motel’s manager and security guard don headphones to monitor what seems now to be little more than gossip flying around this prefabricated house of violence. Which is to say that in this production directorial magic can be found but not, alas, the play itself. In another scene, the gender bending witches do little more than drape themselves seductively over garbage cans and around cauldrons into which they drop disgusting bits of flesh warning the unhinged Macbeth that “something wicked this way comes.” And that his avenging nemesis (Macduff) will be the one “none of women born may harm.”

Images of warring gangs and the horrific dead multiply in Lepage’s mirrors, The worst being the one into which Macbeth—unable to quell rising panic—gazes at what he has become.

There is frantic donning and divesting of bullet proof vests and galloping up motel stairs to a rifle cabinet. Finally, in the misplaced confidence of his invincibility, we see Macbeth seated resolutely in a plastic chair on the upper balcony, rifle across his knees, peering through binoculars as Burnam Wood closes in on him.

Cast members in full gear as relentless bikers who multiply when the vast blackness behind them lights up many mirrors. Photo: David Hou

Bikers in trees creep forward. Then the dreaded announcement. “The queen is dead.” Followed by Macbeth’s Tomorrow and tomorrow speech as her body falls slowly in white light off the balcony. It is a typically beautiful moment from a director seduced by image.

We saw Macduff (played sensitively by veteran actor Tom Rooney) reduced to despair on the floor at the news that Macbeth has murdered his wife and children: “all my pretty ones and their dame.”

Looming over his big machine, he now turns savage. Amidst a fiery shootout he decimates Macbeth in a rain of bullets. Dragging Macbeth’s corpse offstage at the end of a long silver chain, he returns moments later for the garrish finale raising a chain saw over his victim’s head to sever it.

And then the final blackout.

Director’s theatre can be brilliant. Lepage’s often is. It works best though when the core idea emerging from deep inside the play is thoroughly connected to a director’s visual concept. Such productions can speak to us anytime, anywhere. In this case, Lepage’s fascination with Montreal’s biker gang history is too readily super-imposed on the text, hijacking the Scottish play in the service of a subculture that he found theatrically irresistible and moving it into a totally alien world of interest to few others.

*Patricia Keeney is an award-winning Canadian theatre and poetry critic as well as a novelist and poet herself with more than a dozen books to her credit. A long-time professor of Creative Writing and Literature at Toronto’s York University, she has reviewed numerous productions for Critical Stages. Her novel One Man Dancing is based on the true story of Uganda’s famous Abafumi theatre company which operated during the reign of dictator Idi Amin.

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