Borallon inmates to master Macbeth

The witches of Macbeth have never looked quite like those currently rehearsing at Borallon prison.

For the one-off performance on April 30, a dozen inmates have committed to the task of playing male and female characters, refashioning the weird sisters as a trio of hip-hop artists.

The artistic experiment is all in the name of rehabilitation, and is led by UQ senior lecturer and artistic director of the Queensland Shakespeare Ensemble Dr Rob Pensalfini.

Part of the Arts in Community Enhancement (ACE) program, Dr Pensalfini said it had proved as much a learning curve for him as the inmates.

“It’s very different because their backgrounds are different and their education levels are often different,” he said.

“Many haven’t completed high school and we’ve worked with a couple of people who are illiterate.

“At a visceral level though, there are some connections that these guys are making that are immediate and deeper than the sorts of connections made by people who are familiar with Shakespeare’s works.”

The project ties in with the work of late theatre practitioner and activist Augusto Boal and is the only program to fuse his theories and Shakespeare in a prison context.

Macbeth is the third such performance at Borallon after productions of The Tempest in 2006 and Julius Caesar last year.

“Shakespeare is very much presented to us today as being high culture and literary and so on but it wasn’t written in that way. You can really see a lot of the connections that are made when these guys read his works,” Dr Pensalfini said.

The participants have worked with Dr Pensalfini and three of his QSE colleagues twice a week for the last three months to pull the show together.

These sessions have seen the players use drama games to slowly explore the text and its meanings.

“When Shakespeare talks about violence and blood, it’s not just gory, it’s got a rhetoric and semantics behind it, and this play really is the most psychological of all his works in a lot of ways,” Dr Pensalfini said.

Macbeth and Lady Macbeth were good characters to study, Dr Pensalfini said, because they were conscious of what they had done wrong and had to bear the consequences of their crimes.

The performance of Macbeth takes place at Borallon Correctional Centre at 2pm on Friday, April 30.

Media are invited to attend, but must contact ACE program manager Anne Pensalfini (0433 648 100, pensalfi@bigpond.net.au) by April 15 to gain security clearance.

Media: Rob Pensalfini (07 3365 2245, r.pensalfini@uq.edu.au) Anne Pensalfini (0433 648 100, pensalfi@bigpond.net.au) or Cameron Pegg at UQ Communications (07 3365 2049, c.pegg@uq.edu.au)

** High-resolution images of the previous productions at Borallon are also available