DIRECTOR Jordan Best is a known Bard-lover, but even she has to admit that Shakespeare could sometimes have done with a good dramaturg.

Look at the character of Lady Macbeth in the famous tragedy she is staging for Canberra REP, opening this week. What happens to her? Why, so strong in the early parts of the play, does she more or less fade out so that when her death is reported, her husband says,  “She should have died hereafter. There would have been a time for such a word.”

Did Macbeth give orders for her death when he saw that she was giving their bloody secrets away in her sleep? What happened to her child or children?

There are so many questions unanswered. “She’s just gone, it’s a cop out,” Best says.

Nonetheless in a production which Best assures us will have “quite a lot of blood,” one thing is certain, the Macbeths love each other deeply.

Yesterday at Theatre 3,  Best and her two lead actors, Jenna Roberts and Chris Zuber, gave us a sample of both love and blood in the early scene immediately following the murder of King Duncan. Here Lady Macbeth is at full strength, though her husband appears to be wavering.

But why?

“We did a lot of talk about motivation,” Best says, “Her motive is complicated,  as a childless woman’s she has no legacy, no purpose, but  to be queen gives her a purpose.” In Best’s view she’s focusing on achievement, how great it will be to be on the throne, while her husband talks about the consequences of murdering for power”.

One of those consequences, we all know, is her deterioration into madness, though she seems fine during the dinner with Banquo’s ghost when she’s busy covering up her husband’s weaknesses.

“Suddenly she goes mad”, Best says,   “but it’s really Macbeth who is mad as a cut snake.”

That’s the great thing about staging Shakespeare,” she says, “it’s always open to interpretation.”

“Macbeth” at Theatre 3, 3 Repertory Lane, Acton, August 4 (preview) to 20, bookings to canberrarep.org.au or 6257 1950.