All hail, Macbeth. Hail to thee, thane of Gdansk.

The geography is hundreds of miles adrift, but the sentiment is much as Shakespeare intended it.

The West Yorkshire Playhouse, for its mammoth, two-month run, has transplanted Shakespeare's Scottish play to the dockyards of Eastern Europe.

Jude Kelly, the Playhouse's much-admired artistic director, has chosen a 1980s Solidarity milieu to put across the chicanery and blind ambition of Macbeth and his good lady.

The costumes are out of Burtons' reject bin: shabby, pin-striped suits with wide lapels and ill-matching trousers. The text, however, is untouched.

"I started thinking about the way that ambition, if it's handled badly, suddenly produces huge falls," says Kelly.

"Someone like Gorbachev, whom, we all admired, was perceived in his own country to be hugely ambitious, and wasn't liked because of it. And he literally just disappeared. He wasn't assassinated - he just dropped out of public and professional life in the most extraordinary manner."

Kelly also sees a parallel with the Jonathan Aitken case in Britain. "People like that seem to set about the most dangerous acts of political self-destruction because they somehow feel they are entitled to.

"I think it has a lot to do with other people telling them that they are potential leaders, that they're golden boys. Then they assume a feeling of right about their place in the world."

Macbeth will assume not only an East European nationality but also a distinctive aquatic quality. The production's design involves an intricate water sculpture, created by Mario Borza. He and Kelly collaborated last season on the "hip-opera" Deadmeat, and will do again in the theatre's Christmas production of Singin' In The Rain.

"Water contains time," says Kelly. "It holds sound for many days. You can find out what happened in water long after the event. There are moments of reflection in the play - small but vital - and water amplifies them."

The set, in fact, is so elaborate that at the last minute, the show's start date has been delayed to accommodate its installation. It will now open on Monday week, following a generous, six-week rehearsal.

"We get into this standardised thing where we give every play a three or four-week rehearsal period," says Kelly. "But I don't think it's fair to give a five-act play in blank verse the same length of time you'd give to a two-act play in modern colloquial English."

Audiences, she says, yearn to see Shakespeare. "But sometimes it doesn't fully live up to what they feel it could mean.

"Some of the greatest productions in the world have been those by foreign companies where they've spent maybe four months, sometimes longer, rehearsing.

"It's a long way from our grasp in Britain but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be an aspiration."

l Macbeth is at the West Yorkshire Playhouse from October 11 to December 4. Tickets are bookable on 0113 213 7700.

David Behrens

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.