Thinking recently about Shakespeare’s dark masterpiece Macbeth, it occurred to me that Lady Macbeth is given short shrift. She is clearly the most intriguing of all the characters, with Macbeth himself being little more than her puppet, when all is said and done. After she exits the stage he is pretty much lost, his inevitable downfall not the heroic one of a Lear or an Othello, but that of an essentially small man who is really not much of anything without the powerful woman who had fanned the winds of ambition into his sails.
Yet the lady herself never quite gets her due. Why not create a work from her perspective — a feminist reimagining of the Scottish play? In my version, Lady Macbeth would emerge triumphant — rather than be consigned to the madness that seems to be the lot of so many passionate women in our patriarchal world (witness Bertha Rochester, Ophelia, Sylvia Plath, so many others).
Needless to say, such a bold reimagining should to be in the form of a musical. The story provides so many rich possibilities for emotional expression through music and rhyme (example: “Had I been born son not daughter / I would now be Thane of Cawdor”).
So there you have it. “Lady Macbeth, the Musical”. Coming soon, to a theatre near you.