Oxford, Yale Professors To Participate In TFANA Talks Following MACBETH (AN UNDOING)

Theatre for a New Audience has announced two post-show TFANA Talks surrounding performances of the Royal Lyceum Theatre Edinburgh's production of Macbeth (an undoing) written and directed by Zinnie Harris and presented by TFANA in association with Rose Theatre, London.

After 2pm performances, audiences can experience illuminating free discussions with author and Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Oxford University Emma Smith and author and professor of English at Yale University Catherine Nicholson, moderated by TFANA Founding Artistic Director Jeffrey Horowitz (Saturday, April 27); and with Emma Smith and moderator Tanya Pollard, a Shakespeare scholar and Professor of English at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center (Sunday, April 28).

In Shakespeare's Macbeth, Lady Macbeth begins with commanding authority, ruthlessly implementing regicide. But she soon disappears from the story and re-emerges in the last Act, guilt-ridden, hallucinating and driven to suicide by sleep deprivation.  What happened? Zinnie Harris imagines what might be the gaps in Shakespeare's story, undoing the play as we know it and retelling it with Lady Macbeth at its center, in a captivating performance from Nicole Cooper, with her costar Adam Best in the title role.

Horowitz commented, “For Zinnie Harris, and many academics, the provenance of Lady Macbeth's dual impulses of rage and guilt, murder and motherhood, masculine and feminine stretch back to Greek drama and characters such as Clytemnestra, Medea, and Orestes (who, like Lady Macbeth, is haunted by nightmares and cannot sleep). Zinnie isn't reclaiming Shakespeare's play for any particular group. She is exploring the myth behind Lady Macbeth and questioning if the myth might take a different track. Is Lady Macbeth doomed because she disrupts the patriarchy in the play?  Must the cycle repeat?”

For its TFANA Talks series, the organization invites Shakespeare experts into vital dialogue, bringing further context to the bold reconsiderations at the heart of Harris' acclaimed work, praised in The Guardian for its “audacious conjuring of Shakespeare's Macbeth.” Emma Smith has been celebrated for her book This is Shakespeare, a “fun, insightful and profoundly approachable study of 20 of his plays [that] is perhaps the finest critique of his work to date” (The Guardian), and for her engaging lectures on Shakespeare that she has recorded as podcasts. Catherine Nicholson teaches and writes about early modern literature at Yale, and most recently authored the book Reading and Not Reading The Faerie Queene: Spenser and the Making of Literary Criticism.

The Royal Lyceum's production of Macbeth (an undoing) at TFANA is the first part of The Shakespeare Exchange, a reciprocal transatlantic partnership between Royal Lyceum and Theatre for a New Audience. In January 2025, the Lyceum will present TFANA's production of Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, which premiered at TFANA in 2022; the production features John Douglas Thompson as Shylock and is directed by Arin Arbus.

About the Speakers

Catherine Nicholson is a Professor of English at Yale University, where she studies and teaches early modern poetry, prose, and drama. She is the author of Reading and Not Reading The Faerie Queene (2020) and Uncommon Tongues: Eloquence and Eccentricity in the English Renaissance (2014) and is currently researching a book about learning to read in the age of early print.

Tanya Pollard (Chair, TFANA Council of Scholars) is Professor of English at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center. Her books include Greek Tragic Women on Shakespearean Stages (2017), Drugs and Theater in Early Modern England (2005), Shakespeare's Theater: A Sourcebook (2003), the Arden edition of Ben Jonson's The Alchemist (2023), and four co-edited collections of essays on early modern drama, emotions, bodies, and responses to Greek plays. She appeared in Shakespeare Uncovered: Macbeth (PBS, 2013) with Ethan Hawke and in Shakespeare Uncovered: King Lear (PBS, 2015) with Christopher Plummer. Beyond her involvement with TFANA, she has worked with artists and audiences at theaters including the Red Bull, the Public, the Classic Stage Company, and the Roundabout. A former Rhodes Scholar, she has received fellowships from the Guggenheim, NEH, Whiting, and Mellon foundations.

Emma Smith is Professor of Shakespeare Studies at the University of Oxford. Her book This Is Shakespeare was a Sunday Times bestseller, and she has written widely on the reception of Shakespeare in print, performance, and criticism. She has been a dramaturg or advisor to productions on stage and screen, and is Associate Scholar at the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon.

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