SO much for Macbeth being "the Scottish play", as all actors call it in a wish to avoid the legendary thespian curse of Shakespeare's tragedy.

Northern Broadsides are giving it a typically northern broadside in a tour that started off in their Halifax headquaters and has since visited Skipton Cattle Market en route to Scarborough next week, Leeds the week after, and Saltaire midway through next month.

"Macbeth being Scottish is not important in any way, just as Shakespeare never went to Rome or Egypt. It's only Scottish because James I James VI of Scotland was newly on the throne and wanted something writing for him," says artistic director Barrie Rutter, or Rutter as this East Yorkshireman prefers to introduce himself. "It doesn't matter where Dunsinane or Birnam wood is. You just play it for the play - and Macbeth is up there with the greatest.

"As with A Midsummer Night's Dream, you think, 'Oh, everyone's done it', but you don't really get to know a play until you work on it."

And work on it he has. Rutter has done away with an interval, cut Lady Macduff's murder scene in Macduff's castle; axed the Lennox and Another Lord scene, and old Siward has gone near the finale. His reasons. "I've been justified in not having an interval because it suits this company's alacrity. Lady Macduff? When Macduff learns she's dead, so can everyone else. Lennox and the Lord? That's just a story-so-far scene, and Siward? He goes in a bit of trimming at the end."

The result is a Macbeth lasting only one hour, 50 minutes. "It emphasises the speed of the journey he's on, and you still get all this wonderful narrative," says Rutter, who has not over-simplified the play. "If anything, Macbeth has been over-indulged psychologically because one of the abilities of this age is to go into the brain and we then rechristen things in a post-film, indulgent, pseudo-American way, and that's not my way."

Interestingly, Rutter has kept the Porter's oft-discarded, slow-footed comic clowning - "it's a good part", he says - and he has "fun" with the witches, those supernatural midnight hags. "I've gone with the first image I had: a big sheepskin on the earth, and the witches dressed the same way, so they don't have to go off stage; they can just disappear into the rug, in a supernatural way," he says. "What I didn't want to use was pointed hats and green faces!"

Rutter, the latter-day actor-manager of northern theatre, is so often seen in the lead role in Broadsides productions that the shock of him not playing Macbeth rivals Macbeth's reaction to seeing the ghost of Banquo.

The role goes to Andrew Vincent instead. Why? "Anno domini," says Rutter, who also happens to be busy filming the second series of Kay Mellor's Fat Friends. "Age catches up with you - and I want to bring the younger company members on. Andrew's been with the company for a while and he's grabbed the part with both hands - but I am his understudy."

Northern Broadsides' Macbeth on tour: Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough, April 8 to 13, box office, 01723 370541, West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds, April 16 to 20, 0113 213 7700; Salts Mills, Saltaire, May 16 to 19, 01274 531163.

Updated: 09:46 Friday, April 05, 2002