The brief was simple enough. Either choose one of four short scenes from Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, Hamlet or Twelfth Night and illustrate them in four A5 pages, or choose a scene from whichever of Shakespeare’s plays you so desire, with no limitations on page count. Naturally, I went for the Scottish play, Act 1 Scene 1.
Not having to worry about consistency through the whole play, I transposed the scene to a desert in the Middle East (in the play, the background conflict is, after all, a civil war) and changed the Weird Sisters into army medics. More obviously, I focused on the familiars two of them call upon, and made the bold decision to modernise and edit down William’s script in keeping with the 21st Century. (Mind, I wouldn’t want to read the whole play butchered like this!!)
