Space / digital. Designing spatial metaphors in made-for-digital Macbeths

Abstract

This analysis of two digital productions of Macbeth, Kit Monkman’s feature film (2018) and Zoë Seaton’s live show on Zoom (Big Telly, 2020), demonstrates how the play is reimagined through a combination of real and digital spatial designs. The affordances of digital greenscreen backgrounds (using chromakey technology), combined with analogue and CGI design, enable these productions to push the play’s own spatial rhetoric and metaphorical uses of space onto a new level and portray the play’s castle locations as a prison of the mind. As virtual spaces are used to accentuate the tragedy’s own concern with strangeness and shifting environments, they also rub against naturalistic environments that act as bridges to the ‘real’ beyond the world of the play and to its viewers. Digital design, these case studies show, enables productions to translate into a visual language the claustrophobic, haunted environments Shakespeare maps out for his audience.