Modernizing Shakespeare With a Tech Twist

For the past nine years, I’ve been running after-school drama clubs for upper elementary students focused on adapting Shakespeare’s plays. I also spent a year working as a drama teacher with middle school students where we created modern versions of Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth. Now, as a third-grade teacher in an Oregon public school, I’ve continued the after-school drama club—called the Pine Ridge Players—using the same process I started back in 2016. Yet, this year’s show is different from all the previous ones. This time, we’re modernizing Macbeth to incorporate widely held concerns about the influence that technology has on society.

Relatability Makes a Classic Masterpiece Modern

Modern-themed adaptations of Shakespeare are very common—a new adaptation of Othello recently closed on Broadway. The play Macbeth (also known as “The Scottish Play”) is especially dark and serious. It features the despotic rise and tragic fall of Macbeth and his wife, who are charmed by three evil witches. When it was first performed around 1606, the play readily appealed to the recently crowned Scottish king of England and Scotland, King James 1. The year before, he and his government survived the Gunpowder Plot, and he was also an author on the subject of witchcraft. 

The play is intriguing to today’s students because of its darkness, mischievous magic, strong lead characters, and interesting minor roles. For some time now, I’ve thought that the play could relate to the climate crisis and the many “Macbeths” that contribute to it. I debated having that as a theme, but knowing how much influence technology and specifically smartphones have over children, I realized this play could work in a more relatable and hands-on way.

The Process of Creating and Collaboration

When I explained my idea to students at the start of the school year, they were immediately excited about the prospect of combining Shakespeare with the theme of technology addiction. After all, it’s something they’re witnessing all around them, trying to manage in their own lives, and also learning about in the classroom. To set the landscape for our production, I conceived Scotland as a fashionable and furiously ambitious technology company seeking world domination. I purposely avoided naming an existing company.

The process began with us improvising all the major scenes of the play. Working in small groups, I gave the students 10 minutes to create any interpretation they wanted. Next, we watched groups perform the same scene and discussed the presented ideas. After that, we voted on what we liked the best. Sometimes, a suggestion helped every group refine their ideas, such as how to characterize the witches. This process lasted for the first four to eight sessions. 

I put together a first draft using the play’s plot and all of my students’ ideas. I included the most famous lines from the play and incorporated the modern English dialogue that my students came up with earlier. We spent some sessions reading the script together to finalize details. Once this was complete, it was time for auditions. Students presented a short skit or speech for any character they wanted. This took one session, so that I could give them a copy of the first draft by winter break. The students knew which characters they were, so they read the script with the goal of seeing if they liked their dialogue and action, and if not, presenting changes after the winter break.

Maintaining Focus on the Theme

Instead of having multiple Macbeths (as I’ve done before), I split the role into two siblings called “Mac” and “Beth.” As these were mostly fifth-grade students, I changed Lady Macbeth from the wife to the mother, which the students could better relate to, and it avoided any romance that this age group found cringey.

Based on their improvisation activities, students came up with unique scene interpretations and aligned them with the technological theme:

1. The start and end battle scenes would happen inside the company’s virtual reality programs (with lightsabers).
2. There would be four witches instead of three. The fourth witch would be a comic one with funny lines, dressed in bright fairy-like colors. The witches were AI personalities living inside the Scotland company computers. Mac and Beth could only see the witches when they were wearing their virtual reality headsets.
3. The witches were onstage a lot more, hovering in the background, using gestures to show how they directly cast spells when the original play just hinted at it.
4. The character of Ross, a Scottish nobleman, would be a trickster Siri/hologram-style character who appeared when you requested it on a tablet device. His name changed to Scot.
5. The students were keen to keep all the murders in even when I didn’t want to. One student jokingly said that King Duncan and Lady Macbeth should be murdered by robotic vacuum cleaners, so that’s what happened. At the end of the play, Mac and Beth were killed by vacuum cleaners, rather than by Macduff. Parents helped make the vacuum cleaner costumes by using decorated baskets that students wore over their heads and upper bodies.
6. I suggested “advertisement” breaks where characters pitched services from “Scotland,” and two students created the extremely enthusiastic sales representatives.

Some students wanted to finish the show with them directly criticizing members of the audience for having smartphones, but I ruled this out. It’s never a good idea to insult your audience; it’s far better to entertain them and get them thinking. The whole process took up almost the entire school year, once a week from October to early June.

Crediting My Sources

The club meets for an hour and a half every Wednesday after school, and my time is entirely voluntary. That said, The Bend–La Pine Education Foundation kindly tripled its previous grant to allow me to easily pay for all the costumes, the props, and the set. This process began years ago as a classroom literacy project whereby the students voted on which play they wanted to do, and it can still work in that setting.

My new summer tradition is to visit the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, Oregon, and get inspiration from whatever Shakespeare plays they show. They are one of the oldest and largest nonprofit repertory theaters in the country, and they are devoted to a yearly presentation of at least three different plays by the Bard. Last year, their headline show was… Macbeth. This year it’s Julius Caesar, my favorite play from high school. So I already know what we will adapt for the next iteration of my after-school drama club. But you don’t need a local Shakespeare festival to inspire you; your local library will have child-friendly versions of all the major plays, which could inspire you and your students.