Bard jokes: how music-hall greats inspired Stewart Lee to meddle with Macbeth

Shakedowns of Shakespeare scramble the settings. Here’s Romeo and Juliet as cokehead Californians, King Lear as a cattle baron, and Titus Andronicus as an ombudsman. But the text remains sacrosanct – Emma Rice’s nibbling at the pentameters of A Midsummer Night’s Dream irking Globe purists as recently as 2016.

So I was surprised when, at the end of March, the director Wils Wilson invited me, a stand-up comedian, to collaborate with Shakespeare himself, who needed some jokes beefed up in Macbeth, her debut for the Royal Shakespeare Company.

Wilson wanted to retool the comic turn, the gatekeeper called a Porter. “The jokes are pretty unintelligible now,” she said. “English tailors and French hose? Executed Jesuit priests? I want them to be understandable, satirical and funny, but in that sinister, dark way they are in the original. The Porter is the gatekeeper of Hell after all.”