According to one - completely uncorroborated - story, during the first ever performance of "the Scottish Play", Bill Shakespeare himself was forced to play Lady Macbeth when his actor was suddenly overcome with sickness and died. Whether this bares any relation to the truth or not, the famous "Curse of Macbeth", said to have been cast on the play by witches not terribly chuffed with its depiction of their practices, has terrified luvvies for centuries.
Nonetheless, Macbeth still remains one of the most admired and studied of Shakespeare's plays. In March, a new generation of UAE residents will have an opportunity to be introduced to it, when a production aimed at young people is performed in Dubai and Abu Dhabi by the Shakespeare's Globe company, as part of the Abu Dhabi Festival.
Over the centuries, Macbeth has been the subject of some fine, and much-discussed, productions. According to Samuel Pepys's popular paper-based blog from 1667, the "operatic" adaptation of Macbeth by Sir William Davenant was "one of the best plays for a state, and variety of dancing and music, that I ever saw". This version stayed in production until the mid 1700s, long after Pepys had retired to bed.
Among the most standout Macbeths of the 18th century was John Philip Kemble, who performed the role with his sister Sarah Siddons as Lady Macbeth. While some critics argued Kemble's Macbeth was too mannered and polite for Shakespeare, Siddons's troubled queen was unanimously praised. It was these performances that were the first to portray Lady Macbeth's villainy as deeper and more powerful than that of her husband.
In the late 19th century, the drama moved off the stage and into the stalls, with the decade's most notable Macbeth, William Charles Macready. Having played the role in London, he moved to the US, where he became embroiled in a bitter rivalry with the American actor Edwin Forrest, a powerfully voiced individual seen as a man of the working class. On May 7, 1849, supporters of Forrest had bought tickets to see Macready's Macbeth at the Astor Opera House - seen as a theatre for the city's upper classes and elite - and brought the performance to a halt by lobbing fruit, vegetables, shoes and ripped-up seats on to the stage. Three days later, for another performance, 10,000 massed outside the theatre, eventually leading to the new Whig mayor calling out the militia with bloody consequences.
In 1936, Macbeth became Orson Welles's first stage production as director. This all-African-American version at Harlem's Lafayette Theatre became known as the Voodoo Macbeth, with Welles having moved the location from Scotland to the sunnier climes of postcolonial Haiti. In Welles's 1948 film adaptation of the play, he gave himself the lead role.
It was Laurence Olivier's intensity that made many suggest the 1955 Stratford-upon-Avon production of Macbeth was the best of the 20th century. The influential and outspoken British theatre critic Kenneth Tynan asserted that in the role, Olivier "shook hands with greatness" and until then, "no one has ever succeeded as Macbeth."
Just two years later, the Japanese director Akira Kurosawa gave Macbeth a Japanese twist with well-received results in 1957's Throne of Blood, setting the story around warring samurais in feudal Japan. Despite barely featuring a line from the original script, it was described by the critic Harold Bloom as "the most successful film version of Macbeth".
Roman Polanski's 1971 film adaptation was met with mixed results, some finding its graphic violence and nudity rather distracting. While Polanski argued otherwise, the content might have had something to do with the film's producer and financier, Hugh Hefner.
More recently, the story has been transported to the Mumbai underworld for Vishal Bharadwaj's 2004 version, Maqbool, in which Irfan Khan plays a treacherous criminal who rises to become don. And on stage, Patrick Stewart won plaudits for his portrayal of the king for the West End and on Broadway.
It will be interesting to see which version of Macbeth comes to the UAE next month. One thing we do know is that it was specially commissioned as part of Globe Education, the celebrated Globe Company's project aimed at introducing young people to Shakespeare's work and the theatre generally. They could do worse than starting with its fascinating history.