With Blood Comes Blood

With Blood Comes Blood

Show Info

With Blood Comes Blood co-created by James Long, Niall McNeil, and Marcus Youssef

With blood comes blood to open a gate with the door handle.
So, with blood, you do have blood on your hands.

Blood gives away all the victims.
— Niall McNeil in conversation with Marcus Youssef

A few years ago, Niall McNeil approached Marcus Youssef with his next project of interest: a narrative that had fascinated him from a young age and consistently informed his practice as a creator—Macbeth. Throughout Niall’s history of performance-making, Macbeth and various characters from the play come up repeatedly, as do the themes of family and honour, and the actions of hosting, betrayal, and murder. The story is deep in blood and continues to be a point of research for him as a maker.

As they do so well, Niall and Marcus began exploring the text together using a bespoke and instinctual method of working that includes conversation, improvisation, and examining various iterations of the play across different media—film, television, and more. For this project, they also expanded into the concept of documentary, interviewing several colleagues. In August 2025, Neworld supported Niall and Marcus in assembling a group of their favourite collaborators—many from King Arthur’s Night including James Long as director—to take a first look at the impulses, concepts, and material he and Marcus had been developing.   

A significant difference from the King Arthur’s Night ensemble was a more expansive mixing of abilities that moved beyond the binary of neurotypical and atypical to include performer-creators who also identify as physically disabled. This shift has opened new ways of considering ability and how it might connect to the themes, text, and narrative of Macbeth.

Increased attention to integration has entered the rehearsal room, particularly in relation to design. At this point in the work’s development, Niall, in addition to writing and directing, is focusing on designing and operating lights. There are moments where he tracks his shifting points of interest and characters with a camera, and others where he reimagines the lighting on the fly. As Niall puts it, “The lights will give you shadow… the lights will carry on the story.” The disruption of normative aesthetics is opening surprising opportunities for magical realism.

On the fourth day of the workshop, the creative team made what felt like a critical conceptual and dramaturgical discovery. Building on a Niall impulse around the contest/classroom assignment, each of the nine actors—including one with the lived experience of Down syndrome, two wheelchair users, a blind performer, Veda Hille, and a few Bard on the Beach veterans—were asked to deliver Macbeth’s “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” speech in any way they saw fit:

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
—Macbeth, Act V, Scene V

The speech itself is iconic for its bleak view of existence—that each of us, regardless of life experience, is insignificant and subject to a fate beyond our control. For the purposes of the creative research, however, it proved to be a grounding moment, one that bridged aesthetic and conceptual concerns. Watching an expansive collection of bodies and experiences repeat an iconic text asked each of us to assess our own assumptions about ability, gender, personal history, and what life has meant and holds. It was an illuminating, crushing, and hope-filled moment—one of those things you hope for in performance.  

We now look forward to taking these text, design, and conceptual touchstones into our next wave of work: a creative research process that seeks to discover what other information we need to show/tell/share/assume about the collection of bodies on stage to create a resonant experience for an audience. The final form it will take is currently unknown. It could be as complex narratively and scenographically as King Arthur’s Night, or it might be as stripped down as Tiago Rodrigues’s By Heart. As we always have—we will discover the piece by making it with the people in the room.

The production path is another 4 weeks of development leading to a premiere in 2029.