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IT MUST BE THE MOST UNLIKELY SETTING FOR A CLASSICAL MACBETH. Two hundred kilometers north of the Arctic Circle in Sweden, Shakespeare’s story of Macbeth is played out against a backdrop of an almost dreamlike landscape of ice and snow.

The northern lights feed the mystique of the witches and the omnipresent coldness blankets the warm feelings and the murderous obsession of the loving twosome in the Macbeth household. Adding to the uniqueness of this screenplay is the fact Macbeth is performed in the Sámi language, playing out a classical Shakespearean drama on a timeless northern set.

But this film has not been adapted to the Sámi culture and it will not expose Sámi people in their traditional attire. But the Sámi has always relied on nature, as the source of both their material and spiritual culture. It was therefore natural for director Bo Landin to make use of the traditional relation between the Sámi and the surrounding nature when setting the scene for Macbeth.

Never has ice been depicted with such warmth on a screen, and never has ice become such a fertile ground for sorcery, revenge and love. Shakespeare’s Macbeth paints vivid pictures with strange metaphors, which has provided a great challenge for translators and actors to correctly express behavior and words that the Sámi language does not inherently contain. In the lead roles of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth we find actors Toivo Lukkari and Anitta Suikkari. Other roles are performed by Irene Länsman, Elisabeth H Blind, Nils Henrik Buljo Beaska Niilas, Ebba Joks, Mikkel Gaup and Per Henrik Bals.

The tale centers on Macbeth, mighty warlord of King Duncan’s army, whose battlefield successes warrant him great promotions in rank and title. Meanwhile, he meets witches, witches who come with prophecies about his future as well as that of his friend Banquo. This future depicts Macbeth himself as King. As the predictions come true, one by one, Macbeth’s power-seeking wife Lady Macbeth presses him forward, deeper into a moral despair where one murder soon demands another.

The blood on the hands of the murderers will not wash off, and Macbeth’s transformation into an instrument of evil is simultaneously a metaphor for several other transformations: the dissolution of the self, the crumbling of meaning, the fall of hierarchies. In first–time director Bo Landin’s interpretation of Macbeth, the landscape and Macbeth’s environs play a lead role. The witches rise like a cloud of breath in the icy air before dissolving and uniting with the snowy woods and mysterious northern lights.

Their presence is felt through the ominous crows and the wolves that howl in the dark winter night. Who is Macbeth really trying to annihilate, and what lesson is it the witches are trying to teach him about the meaning of life and the nature of all things – and possibly about the relation to his environment?