Written By Hannah McGill Taken from The List - Glasgow and Edinburgh Events Guide

Pictures taken from The Scotsman front page, Scotland on Sunday and The List

In September 1999, Dannii like Judi Dench and Jane Horrocks before her, tackled one of the most demanding and sought after Shakespearian roles - Lady MacBeth. And just to prove that all the world is indeed a stage, she's did it outdoors!

It could almost be a wind up. MacBeth with Dannii Minogue. And a load of Ukrainian stilt-walkers. And a soundtrack of trance, soul and Balkan rock. In a garden. By torchlight. It sounds like some wag's satire on the esoteric experimental excesses of the Edinburgh Fringe. It's not. Journey To MacBeth is one of two outre takes on Shakespere that will be brought to the Royal Botanic Gardens this year by one of the most acclaimed Fringe companies of the 90s. Theatrum Botanicum's spectacular outdoor productions have bagged them practically every award Edinburgh offers - including five Scotsman Fringe Firsts - and had critics in raptures year after year.

This time around, director and company founder Toby Gough has teamed up with Teatr 77 from Poland, the Kiev Experimental Theatre, and the Australian company JuJu Space Jazz for a project that he describes as 'the tonic that Edinburgh needs, after all those cramped little theatres; to get outside, hear some great music, and watch the fantastic Dannii Minogue in a great story of blood, sex and violence!

Gough claims that casting Dannii wasn't just a headline-grabbing play; it was the fulfillment of a long-cherished hope. 'I couldn't think of anyone better to play the part,' he asserts. 'I've always wanted to work with her, and I've been planning to do this show at the Festival for years. So when I asked her if she wanted to have a stab - as the saying goes! - and she agreed to do it, it was a dream bit of casting for me.'

The lady herself is no less enthusiastic about adding Shakespeare to an already crowded CV; it would take more than a long deceased literary sacred cow to shake her composure. Confident and articulate, she could hardly reside further from the feather-brained bimbette territory she's generally thought to occupy. Lady MacBeth's soliloquys might seem demanding in comparison with stints on Home and Away and Fully Booked, but Dannii far from fazed.

'It wasn't daunting; it was intriguing,' she says. It was the freedom Gough offered her to develop hew character as she saw fit that convinced her to take the role. 'I'm very fussy not only about what role I play but also about the production and the style in which it's done. Toby has a unique vision. There was no way I was going to waste my time coming up to Edinburgh and doing something that's been done before. The Lady MacBeth I play will be Dannii Minogue's Lady MacBeth, and when people see it they'll know that it couldn't possibly be anyone else.'

Spoken like a born theatrical diva. Dannii's approach is not that of a giggly rent-a-celeb adding glitz and tits to a production beyond her intellectual scope; she takes the project, and herself, very seriously indeed. Unsurprising, the fact that the press and public might not be quite so ready to accept her as a Shakespearian heavyweight does not concern her. 'I'm not going to please everyone. If I worried about what people thought, I'd still be living in Australia and I never would have tried anything.'

In the event, she tried many things, from music and TV to fashion design and, recently, a spate of FHM-style glamour modelling. Down under, Dannii's fame preceded and exceeded that of her big sister Kylie, but she has always resisted categorisation. 'It's good for people to see me in a different light; it expands their minds. people constantly want to pigeonhole me, to say I'm just a TV presenter, not just a singer, not just an actress. I'm not just anything. I'm a whole bunch of things and I keep pushing myself to be as diverse as I can, because it interests me. It goes along with my personality - diving straight into things, doing something completely full-on in the greatest possible depth.'

Tody Gouch sees Dannii as a natural Lady MacBeth, describing her as 'a fantastic performer with fantastic sexuality and fantastic guts.' Does Dannii feel any kinship with that most driven and determined of leading ladies? 'Ohh ... it would be a pretty broad thing to say I identified with her. Everyone has determination - it's a question of how you use it. Hers is based on power and success and conquering; she doesn't care what she has to do or who gets hurt in the process. In that way we're very, very different. I'm not living for when I have a Number One record or when I make a million trillion dollars. I'm not doing this to get somewhere else. I'm doing it because I'm doing it.'