Review: WA Ballet’s Macbeth at His Majesty’s Theatre 

WA Ballet: Macbeth at His Majesty’s Theatre
Saturday, September 25, 2026

West Australian Ballet continued their 2026 season into the warm Perth spring with Macbeth, a fresh and startlingly bold reinvention of The Scottish Play made over into modern dance—provocative, experimental, and so very, very contemporary.  Although the pre-season marketing had leant heavily into the party-political aspects of the story, being a mere block away from the ivory towers of St Georges Terrace, it was not too difficult to also view this as a tale of utter corporate bastardry.

It was also eagerly anticipated before attendance how ballet could tell the original story, so dense with words, without actual speech. The answer was surtitles, a solution obvious in hindsight, projected onto a transparent screen between audience and artists. This written prose, sparingly used and as ethereal as smoke, nonetheless enhanced the rest of the performance by the sheer audacity of its minimalism.

Far from the only audacious choice this evening, the overall plot was pushed forward in time from medieval Scotland to the modern board room. Rather than engaging a rebellion in bloody combat, our protagonist and his best friend Banquo opened the piece by either hostile takeover or an effective use of branch stacking. In suits and corporate wear rather than armour and kilts, the duo encountered the witches, updated tonight to three phone-addicted influencers, all too seductive with their easy promises of power.

Accompanying the machinations onstage was a musical score exceedingly brave in bucking almost every trend one could imagine for ballet, near obliterating any and all traditional motifs that came within its gravitational pull. From electric guitars to synths, cellos through to clarinets, His Majesty’s all but throbbed with notes of jazz, prog-rock, West End musicals and even choir.  With so many seemingly discordant influences in the mix, but enough space given for each portion to fully breathe, the overall sum was definitively more than its parts.

The set design was exceedingly strong. The panels of glorious silver and gold made it feel as though the dancers were directly inside the Chrysler Building or perhaps a similar art deco monument. The colours, with costumes black, grey, or white and the backing red, silver, or gold, made for some striking visual contrasts. The feasts for Duncan and the arrival of Banquo’s Ghost were lavish affairs, at certain points displaying an iconography almost akin to The Last Supper.

That is all without even mentioning two of the potential highlights of the night, the entrance and exit of Lady Macbeth. The former was a spectacular physical interpretation of either a split-screen or directly adjacent cartoon panels, as her husband gave a phone call after meeting the influencers. The exit, as she withered away from guilt and self-disgust, seemed to distinctly reference The Death of Marat, another revolution that had swallowed its own.

The dancers were uniformly exceptional. Although quite possibly the worst married couple in all English literature, Oscar Valdes as Macbeth and Dayana Hardy Acuna as Lady Macbeth absolutely sizzled with chemistry together and drew both eyes and attention the few times they were apart. Gakuro Matsui was astonishingly great as Banquo, and, when his character’s ghost made its fateful appearance, the choreography between Matsui and Valdes was sublime, even literally flipping the table upon exit.

Although he only danced in Act One, Juan Carlos Osma as Duncan was an imperious, steady, and always thoughtful presence on stage, whilst The Influencers, Adam Alzaim, Nikki Blain, and Indiana Scott, were given full permission to act as oddly as anyone tonight, literally overdosing on the Kool-Aid, endlessly scrolling through social media.

The denouement of the evening, as the Mad King fought not only Macduff but everyone else he had destroyed or torn down on his way up, was another stunning achievement by the stage crew, with blinding white light reflected into the audience from a golden mirror, as if it were a sacrifice to the sun-god. The callback to the weapon used against Banquo half an hour earlier was an especially nice touch.

Likely enough of a challenge to update The Bard to dance in the first place, this team then took it upon themselves to time-jump a Shakespearean ballet forward four hundred years as well. At times the performance seemed as equally inspired by seventies rock opera, Bogart-era noir, or The Great Gatsby as it was by The Globe Theatre. The concept was astonishing, the dancing was spectacular, and even the music, which had jarred to begin with, more than organically filled the space as the night progressed.

This Scottish Ballet, to perhaps coin a phrase, was not your grandmother’s Nutcracker or Swan Lake. The performance, as given tonight, revelled in its sense of non-conformity and will absolutely polarise the ballet community, both here in Perth and further afield. The audience that this resonates with will be near-rabid in their affection and ultra-passionate in coming to its defence.

A stunningly singular piece that breaks a lot of the rules.

PAUL MEEK

Photos by Sergey Pevnev