The play mostly takes place in underground bunkers with that distinct "drop a nuke on us" charm, and the witches are a trio of nurses who wander around in the background. So Macbeth ( Patrick Stewart) sports a Joseph Stalin mustache and an AK-47, while throwing up giant posters of himself when he's king. Goold moves the setting from the hose-and-doublets era to a weird combination of Scotland and a World War II-era Soviet Union. Within that frame, he's free to play with all kinds of cool ideas, many of which weren't around when Shakespeare penned the play in the first place. He sticks to the dialogue straight from Shakespeare, though he cuts a few lines here and there and moves some scenes around. Take Rupert Goold's 2010 version of Macbeth, for example. That helps Shakespeare stay relevant and demonstrates why his writings still speak to us in the 21st century. As long as you stick to the text, anything goes. Beyond that, you can do whatever you like when putting on a show: crazy costumes, anachronistic sets, actors best known for playing bald starship captains. So the text itself is basically just dialogue and a few bits of stage direction (including the ever awesome "exit, pursued by a bear," which shows up in A Winter's Tale). The great thing about Shakespeare is that it's supposed to be performed rather than read.
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