Look like the innocent flower but be the serpent under it in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s first ever video game.
Announced on Wednesday, the British theatre company has teamed up with New York indie game studio iNK Stories (Revolution: Black Friday) to create Lili, a thriller noir game focused on the damned spot-laden Lady Macbeth.
Set in modern Iran, the interactive story-based game uses cinematic footage with point-and-click functions. Lili stars French-Iranian Holy Spider actor Zar Amir as Lady Macbeth, referred to as “Lili” (Amir’s own Alambic Production co-produced the game). Players make decisions for the Scottish play’s villainous queen, amid a setting of authoritarian rule and gender oppression in Iran. As for the rest of Macbeth‘s characters, all we know so far is the all-important witches are realised as hackers.
Lili is currently in development, with a 2025 release date and platforms to be announced.
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Zar Amir in “Lili.”
Credit: Ellie Smith
“It pushes the boundaries of storytelling, marking an inflection point in the depth of expression within commercial video games and expanding the creative vision of the RSC into new, interactive territory,” Vassiliki Khonsari, co-founder of iNK Stories, said in a statement.
“A video game based on Shakespeare’s Macbeth is a thrilling endeavour that transforms one of literature’s darkest and most compelling tales — of gender, ambition, fate, power, and morality into an immersive, interactive experience.”
It’s not the first game based on Shakespeare’s work but it is the first direct from the Royal Shakespeare Company — an organisation which has staged Macbeth many, many times. To honour Shakespeare’s words, iNK Stories worked with leading Oxford Shakespeare academic, RSC board member, and author Emma Smith on the text adaptation.
Long the stuff of narrative legend, Shakespeare’s work has most recently found a crossover with cinema and gaming through the lauded Grand Theft Hamlet, a documentary film in which filmmakers Pinny Grylls, Sam Crane, and Mark Oosterveen staged a production of the Shakespearean tragedy within the game Grand Theft Auto Online.
“As a storytelling medium, gaming today is what theatre has always been; a chance to explore worlds, inhabit story, and experience something at once personal and communal,” said Daniel Evans and Tamara Harvey, RSC co-artistic directors, in a statement. “Centring this tense thriller around Lady Macbeth rather than her husband is radical and transformative. It turns the play’s questions around gender, identity and power inside out.”
