Digital acting troupe brings Shakespeare's Macbeth to life in Fallout 76

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Actors put on a 45-minute in-game performance of 'The Scottish Play' in a recreated Globe Theater.

With live theatre performances largely sidelined during the pandemic, enterprising thespians have had to get a little creative. Luckily there's more than one way to put on a play—such as by staging it inside Fallout 76. 

That's what The Theatre Company, a Fallout 76 acting troupe, has been doing to keep their acting chops nice and sharp over the past year. So far they've used Fallout 76 to perform scenes from plays like Hamlet, Clockwork Orange, Grease, Newsies, West Side Story, and others.

The troupe's most recent show took place near the end of October. It was a performance of Shakespeare's Macbeth (otherwise known as The Scottish Play due to a long-running superstition that saying the name of the play is bad luck). You can watch the full performance above, which runs about 45 minutes long.

One member of the team recreated the Globe Theatre, Shakespeare's original playhouse, which was demolished in 1644. Eight players performed together over local voice chat and often using Fallout 76's emotes or holding propes to punctuate the dialogue. Most played multiple roles, with a backstage area of the playhouse allowing for multiple costume changes.

It's all pretty delightful stuff, and I imagine it's quite the undertaking to produce, perform, and record a play like Macbeth, even with an adapted (and shortened) script. And even after taking their bows, they're not done treading the boards. The Theatre Company is currently working on staging The Nutcracker at a recreated version of the Bolshoi for the holidays. As they say in the theatre, break a leg!

Thanks, Eurogamer.

Christopher Livingston
Christopher Livingston
Senior Editor

Chris started playing PC games in the 1980s, started writing about them in the early 2000s, and (finally) started getting paid to write about them in the late 2000s. Following a few years as a regular freelancer, PC Gamer hired him in 2014, probably so he'd stop emailing them asking for more work. Chris has a love-hate relationship with survival games and an unhealthy fascination with the inner lives of NPCs. He's also a fan of offbeat simulation games, mods, and ignoring storylines in RPGs so he can make up his own.