With a string of high-profile screen roles, awards and nominations to his name, Christopher Eccleston is easily one of the most recognisable and well-regarded actors working in the UK today. It’s somewhat bemusing to realise, then, that it’s only now, at the age of 53, that he’s finally making his RSC debut, as he prepares to tread the boards in Shakespeare’s Scottish play. 

If you didn’t know better, you might assume it was a choice - perhaps the Salford council-estate lad simply decided that Stratford-upon-Avon and the Bard weren’t intended for the likes of him. On the contrary, however - this is a life goal that’s taken him decades to realise.

“What a lot of people don’t know about me is that I became obsessed with Shakespeare when I was 15,” says Eccleston. “He’s my favourite writer, and not a day goes by when I don’t quote or read him. In a way, this is the most important role I’ve ever done. I fell in love with Macbeth when I was 17 and playing Macduff in an amateur production. At that time - and this is absolutely true - I decided that my greatest ambition was to play Macbeth with the Royal Shakespeare Company. So it was actually my love of Macbeth that made me follow this career path.”

Few who know anything about Chris Eccleston will be surprised to hear his explanation for what has held him back: he’s never made a secret of how he feels his northern, working-class roots have affected perceptions of him. But these days it’s more than just a class war that he’s fighting: he’s acutely aware of the lack of diversity on all fronts in the British theatre world. 

“There is still, I believe, a notion that in order to do Shakespeare you have to be white, middle-class and male, because there’s an association of those things with high intelligence, great sensitivity and entitlement, and it’s been a great frustration in my career that I’m not thought of as a Shakespearean actor. But Shakespeare belongs to me and to people of colour, and great roles like Macbeth and Othello belong to women as much as they do to men.”

He’s not alone in flagging up these problems. While ideas like ‘gender-blind’ and ‘colour-blind’ casting are slowly starting to take root, the wider social and economic context of the UK is in some ways making it harder than ever for people from backgrounds like Eccleston’s to countenance creative careers.
“I wouldn’t get into drama school now, no way, yet people say I’m a very good actor,” says Eccleston, with characteristic matter-of-fact conviction. 

From here, he launches into a passionate plea for working-class performers to seize the keys to the ivory towers they’ve been shut out from. Far too many comfortable people, he thinks, simply pay lip service to diversity; real change will only come from pressure from ordinary people. It’s perhaps unsurprising, then, that his reading of Macbeth is coloured by some of those same frustrations. 

“On one level, Macbeth justifies murdering Duncan to himself because he feels that he would be a good leader who would make the country safe. He’s militarily and politically concerned that Scotland is vulnerable because Duncan is ageing and his regime is allowing them to be attacked by both Norwegians and rebels within their own troops, so he thinks a sterner hand is needed. 

“But he also acknowledges that he is ambitious, and the woman who loves him encourages him to embrace that. He knows he’s never going to be properly rewarded for his work, because he doesn’t have the blue blood and the old school tie, so if he really wants it, he’s going to have to take it.”

In Polly Findlay’s new production, contemporary parallels for this discontent are emphasised by a modern setting - something she also employed in her last collaboration with Eccleston on Sophocles’ Antigone, in which his performance as Creon attracted comparisons with Tony Blair. It’s understandable that Eccleston shies away from such direct connections. Still, it’s hard to get away from a sense that Macbeth feels particularly timely now, especially given that four new UK productions - a film, an opera and two plays - are all premiering at around the same time this year. 

There are other elements at play, however. What’s less often talked about but essential to an understanding of the play is Macbeth’s obsession with the idea of a legacy. Arguably, it’s not so much the initial death of Duncan that causes things to fall apart, but actually the subsequent slaughtering of Banquo and attempted murder of his son. 

Not content with his own shot at regal glory, the childless Macbeth is consumed by jealousy at the witches’ prediction that his best friend’s offspring will succeed him. This feeds back into the intense domestic relationship at the heart of the story, showing how easily the personal becomes political. 

“For me, the play is scenes from a marriage as much as it’s about a traitor. The relationship between Macbeth and Lady Macbeth is key. It’s a deep, romantic love, and even in their madness, right up to the end, the most important person in either of their worlds is each other. I think they’ve been devastated by the loss of their children and their inability to have more, and a lot of what happens is them both trying to make each other feel better about that absence of a future. 

“We wanted to avoid the misogynistic, unmotivated portraits of women that you sometimes get with Lady Macbeth - that idea of the female evil and the temptress. Macbeth might have more lines, but Niamh [Cusack] and I are both on the poster and I think the characters are absolute equals.”

Add to this the show’s female director, and its broadly young and ethnically diverse cast, and you get the sense that real change is underway. And as Eccleston himself confesses, it’s been a truly democratic rehearsal process in that everyone is happy to ‘steal’ ideas from everyone else. 

Macbeth shows at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, from Tuesday 13 March to Tuesday 18 September.