Macbeth

Matthew Wild’s Macbeth throws Verdi’s tragedy into a fractured, near-future Scotland where democracy has collapsed, old feudal structures have returned, and political power is enforced through violence, ritual and spectacle. Scottish tradition collides with contemporary militarism in a world Wild described as “Braveheart with machine guns.”

We designed the video language as an extension of that unstable political world. Monumental propaganda imagery and public displays sit against manipulated live camera feeds, turning the stage between a machinery of power and a projection of Macbeth’s increasingly fractured perception. Images can begin as documentation and mutate into memory, hallucination or threat.

Across the production, the supernatural is given its own visual logic: the witches, dead soldiers, Macbeth’s letter, Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking and the advancing Birnam Wood each emerge through a shifting system of filmed and manipulated imagery, sprinkled with some CGI magic. Rather than illustrating the action, video becomes part of the mechanism that constantly blurs political reality with the psychological and the uncanny.