Presented by Al Seed Productions
in partnership with Tramway
Macbeth is dead.
Al Seed Productions returns to Scotland’s stages with THRICE, a theatrical response to Shakespeare’s Macbeth, led by a nine-strong chorus of performers.
Both a response to the play and to our present moment, THRICE places nine women in the aftermath of the story, asking what it might mean to live on in the shadow of ruin. Words once spoken by soldiers and tyrants are absorbed and transformed by the figures who haunt the play’s edges: the ‘witches’.
- Running time
- Approx 50 mins, no interval
- Age guidance
- 12+
- Content warnings
- Implied violence, strobe and flashing lights, haze, prolonged blackout, loud noise
What did you think of THRICE? Let us know here!
Director’s Note
I began to notice that every time I watched a new production or film of Macbeth, I was gunning for the witches. For me, the making of our show has been to unpack why this happens.
There’s certainly good reason to side with the witches, however villainously they might be presented. It’s well documented that a large part of Shakespeare’s motivation for writing Macbeth was to ingratiate himself with King James I/VI, author of Daemonologie, and the kingdom’s witch-hunter-in-chief. In contrast to the high poetry spoken by Lord and Lady Macbeth, the words Shakespeare puts in the mouths of the witches are crude, often silly. While the role of the witches within the play is ambiguous and complex, as beings they are caricatures. In the context of the witch trials of the early 17th century, and the violences that swirled around them, one has the clear sense that Shakespeare’s depiction of his ‘witches’ is also a kind of violence, by which the voices of historical women are silenced, and the benign – but unchristian – practices for which they were condemned, distorted out of all recognition.
I think this perspective on the witches is increasingly informed by the world that has been emerging over the course of making Thrice. Now, when the witches say “Fair is foul and foul is fair,” I hear it not as a curse, but as a lament: an incredulity at a world inverted, in which despotism and cruelty can parade – so openly, and in so many settings – as a kind of humanitarianism.
Our show takes place in the ruins that exist as Shakespeare’s play concludes. As at the end of any war, civilians are recounting what has happened, picking up the broken pieces, and working to find the beginnings of a healing process. There is a recognition of grief, of outrage, and also of a kind of absurdity – that we may be about to do it all over again.
Ours is not a literal world, however. Our ‘witches’ work through acts of ritual and embodiment, not reasonable debate. Nevertheless, every word spoken in our show originates in the play’s text: i.e. in dialogue that our ‘witches’ have been able to absorb, repurpose, and speak back to us with renewed – sometimes inverted – meaning.
Thrice presents nine (3×3) ‘witches’, reflecting the many historical groupings of mythological and supernatural women who are associated with these numbers. Our large cast is emblematic of the intensely collaborative nature of the overall project, and I am especially thankful to Jude Milligan and Lina Limosani, whose long-term collaboration the show is grounded in. I also need to express particular gratitude for the unwavering care and rigour employed by Siobhan Clark in keeping the work of twenty-plus personnel moving towards a satisfying conclusion…
’Tis time. We hope you enjoy the show.
Al Seed
Cast
- Alys Williams
- Ashley Smith
- Jennifer Steele
- Jessie Roberts-Smith
- Maya Bodiley
- Monet Debois
- Samuela Noumtchuet
- Sarah Farrell
- Tess Letham
Creative and Production
- Storyboarding & Direction
- Al Seed · Judith Milligan
- Choreography
- Lina Limosani
- Producer
- Siobhan Clark
- Music & Sound Design
- Guy Veale
- Lighting Design
- Alberto Santos Bellido
- Costume Design
- Zephyr Liddell
- Costume Supervisor
- Catriona Charlton
- Performance Development
- Helen Mackay · Fionnuala Dorrity
- Production Manager
- Robbie Fraser
- Set Design Assistant
- Frankie Collier-Prickett
- Stage Manager
- Alma Lindenhovius
- Marketing Manager
- Jessica McGoff
- PR Associate
- Hannah Bradley Croall
- Photography
- Alberto Santos Bellido
- Costume Maker
- Emily Smit-Dicks
- Costume Assistant
- Saehee Simmons
- Costume Dyer
- Joanna Kinnersly-Taylor
- Costume Breakdown Artist
- Rachel McIvor
- BSL Interpreters
- Lesley Crerar · Lisa Li
For Al Seed Productions
- Director
- Al Seed
- Producer
- Siobhan Clark
- Company Management Support
- Tuesday McPhail
- Board
- Viktoria Begg · Tony Mills · Sam Gough
Special Thanks
Michael Wilson, Becky Minto, Diana Dumi, Robin Jones, Michael and Caroline at Fairliehope, LJ Findlay-Walsh, Dominic Hill, Niloo-Far Khan, Alan Richardson & Surge, and Jill Smith & all the staff at Tramway.
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Fri16Oct
Tramway Glasgow
7.30pm
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Sat17Oct
Tramway Glasgow
7.30pm
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Mon19Oct
The Anatomy Rooms Aberdeen
7pm · DanceLive 2026
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Wed21Oct
Dundee Rep Dundee
7.30pm
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Fri23Oct
Traverse Edinburgh
7.30pm
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Sat24Oct
Traverse Edinburgh
7.30pm
Text Used in the Show
In chronological order, repeats omitted
Hail! Hail! Hail!
Hail, king! For so thou art. Behold where stands
The usurper’s cursèd head. The time is free.
Look into the seeds of time.
Say which grain will grow.
Speak, then, to me.
When shall we three meet again?
In thunder, lightning, or in rain?
When the hurly-burly’s done,
When the battle’s lost and won.
That will be ere the set of sun.
Where the place?
Upon the heath…
Anon.
Fair is foul, and foul is fair;
Hover through the fog and filthy air.
If it were done when ’tis done,
then ’twere well it were done quickly.
Fly, good Fleance.
Fly! Fly! Fly!
The table is full. Gentlemen rise!
’Tis time!
Thrice to thine
And thrice to mine
And thrice again to make up nine.
Peace the charm’s wound up.
’Tis time, ’tis time!
I am in blood.
The Thane of Fife he had a wife, oh, oh, oh!
Titles given to Macbeth in the play:
Host / Highness / Husband / Sir / Grace / Liege / Devilish / Valour’s Minion / Thane / Majesty / Worthy / Valiant / Noble / Brave / Lord / King /
Tyrant / Abhorrèd / Hellhound / Coward / Dead butcher!
Yield thee, coward
And live to be the show and gaze o’ the time
We’ll have thee, as our rarer monsters are,
Painted upon a pole, and underwrit
“Here may you see the tyrant.”
Alas, poor country,
Almost afraid to know itself. It cannot
Be called our mother, but our grave.
The dead man’s knell
Is there scarce asked for who, and good men’s lives
Expire before the flowers in their caps,
Dying or ere they sicken.
The way to dusty death…
The night has been unruly. Where we lay,
Our chimneys were blown down and, as they say,
Lamentings heard i’ th’ air, strange screams of death,
And prophesying with accents terrible,
Of dire combustion and confused events
New hatched to the woeful time. The obscure bird
Clamored the livelong night. Some say the Earth
Was feverous and did shake.
It will have blood, they say. Blood will have blood.
Stones have been known to move, and trees to speak;
Augurs and understood relations have
By maggot-pies and choughs and rooks brought forth
The secret’st man of blood.
What is the night? ’Tis time.
Each new morn,
New widows howl, new orphans cry, new sorrows
Strike heaven on the face, that it resounds
As if it felt with our-land, and yelled out
Like syllable of dolour…
I think our country sinks beneath the yoke.
It weeps, it bleeds; and each new day a gash
Is added to her wounds…
Bleed, bleed poor country.
We have scorched the snake, not killed it:
She’ll close, and be herself, whilst our poor malice
Remains in danger of her former tooth.
Better be with the dead,
Whom we, to gain our peace, have sent to peace,
Than on the torture of the mind to lie
In restless ecstasy.