I suppose you want one of two things out of a Shakespeare movie.
Either you want some radical new take on the text, which makes you think “That’s shown me the play in a different way. It would not have occurred to me to do Richard III in the First World War. But they’ve made it work.”
Or maybe they haven’t made it work. Maybe they’ve annoyed me. But that’s okay too.
On the other hand, a good film might just allow me to sit back and experience the story. Never mind that I’ve seen the play a hundred times before. Just remind me what happens in it.
A couple of weeks before Macbeth we saw a slightly experimental version of King Lear at the minuscule Alma theatre in Clifton. It was entitled Queen Lear; the excessively honest child was Prince Cordelius; and the Fool called her mistress “Auntie”. It wasn’t the greatest piece of acting I have ever seen; but by the second act I was engrossed in the story. I wanted to see mad Edwin finally catch up with his mum, the blinded Duchess of Gloucester. Not for any deep interpretative reason: I just wanted to find out what would happen.
I think is why I can never see too many Hamlets. Not because I am hoping for a new theory about why he procrastinated or why he was out of town when his Dad was killed. But because the whole world of Elsinor -- not just the Prince, but his mates, and the actors, and the daft old man with the platitudes and the actors and the battlements and the whale shaped cloud -- is not a place I would want to live, but it’s a place I want to visit. To go back to, over and over and over.
That was why Papaa Essiedu worked so well for me. Not because diversity, or because I thought there were Africans in medieval Denmark: but because he didn’t look or sound like my stock mental picture of Hamlet; which meant that I was meeting Hamlet again for the first time.
On the other hand, a good film might just allow me to sit back and experience the story. Never mind that I’ve seen the play a hundred times before. Just remind me what happens in it.
A couple of weeks before Macbeth we saw a slightly experimental version of King Lear at the minuscule Alma theatre in Clifton. It was entitled Queen Lear; the excessively honest child was Prince Cordelius; and the Fool called her mistress “Auntie”. It wasn’t the greatest piece of acting I have ever seen; but by the second act I was engrossed in the story. I wanted to see mad Edwin finally catch up with his mum, the blinded Duchess of Gloucester. Not for any deep interpretative reason: I just wanted to find out what would happen.
I think is why I can never see too many Hamlets. Not because I am hoping for a new theory about why he procrastinated or why he was out of town when his Dad was killed. But because the whole world of Elsinor -- not just the Prince, but his mates, and the actors, and the daft old man with the platitudes and the actors and the battlements and the whale shaped cloud -- is not a place I would want to live, but it’s a place I want to visit. To go back to, over and over and over.
That was why Papaa Essiedu worked so well for me. Not because diversity, or because I thought there were Africans in medieval Denmark: but because he didn’t look or sound like my stock mental picture of Hamlet; which meant that I was meeting Hamlet again for the first time.
And because he's a very good actor, of course.
I didn’t think Joel Coen’s (The Tragedy of) Macbeth really pulled off either of those things. Denzel Washington was okay. I didn’t think he was great, but he was okay. I liked him best at the end when he was being mad and manic and despotic and angry. At the beginning he was almost too noble. I wasn’t convinced that this soldier would actually do a murder, much less a regicide.
There’s a Royal Shakespeare company production with Christopher Eccleston. There’s no doubt that Eccleston manages to convince you that this guy's a maniac; that he’d do it. And enjoy doing it, at some level.
Macbeth is a difficult play. It’s short -- maybe part of the text is missing -- and some of the extant lines may not be by Shakespeare. (Coen omits quite a lot of the toiling and troubling.) The film looks beautiful in heavy black and white but after the first couple of scenes I kind of felt “Look, I've seen the shot of the characters face in the sort of middle distance talking directly a camera. I know that’s the schtick; I accept that it’s dramatic. I get that it’s a succession of face speaking directly to the audience. But it makes the movie feel static and slow. It’s a succession of images; it hardly ever catches fire as drama. Macbeth recites Is This a Dagger. He recites it beautifully; but he doesn't inhabit it.
Some of the images I liked a great deal. When Macbeth hears that the wood is marching he opens the castle gate and hundred of leaves blow in. The final fight with Macduff takes place on the empty battlements: there is no attempt to do a massed battle: it’s just two guys, fighting. The empty spaces may be the result of filming during a pandemic.
I liked the use of a figure in a black hood, possibly a minor Thane, who brings MacBeth the news that he’s become Thane of Cawdor, and personally chops off the treasonous Thane’s head. He pops up again as the mysterious Third Murderer, who help Fleance escape, and hides him until the end of the play. He's some kind of Fate, maybe an agent of the witches.
It’s static. It’s very slow. It would be a good thing to show to students who were doing Macbeth at school and weren’t sure if they could follow the plot. It’s very clear. It’s judiciously adapted. Some movies chop lines out of one scene and distribute them through three others; which gives those of us who know the text a headache. (See also under Jackson, Peter.) There is none of that here. Cuts there were, but I never felt I was watching an adaptation.
I didn’t think Joel Coen’s (The Tragedy of) Macbeth really pulled off either of those things. Denzel Washington was okay. I didn’t think he was great, but he was okay. I liked him best at the end when he was being mad and manic and despotic and angry. At the beginning he was almost too noble. I wasn’t convinced that this soldier would actually do a murder, much less a regicide.
There’s a Royal Shakespeare company production with Christopher Eccleston. There’s no doubt that Eccleston manages to convince you that this guy's a maniac; that he’d do it. And enjoy doing it, at some level.
Macbeth is a difficult play. It’s short -- maybe part of the text is missing -- and some of the extant lines may not be by Shakespeare. (Coen omits quite a lot of the toiling and troubling.) The film looks beautiful in heavy black and white but after the first couple of scenes I kind of felt “Look, I've seen the shot of the characters face in the sort of middle distance talking directly a camera. I know that’s the schtick; I accept that it’s dramatic. I get that it’s a succession of face speaking directly to the audience. But it makes the movie feel static and slow. It’s a succession of images; it hardly ever catches fire as drama. Macbeth recites Is This a Dagger. He recites it beautifully; but he doesn't inhabit it.
Some of the images I liked a great deal. When Macbeth hears that the wood is marching he opens the castle gate and hundred of leaves blow in. The final fight with Macduff takes place on the empty battlements: there is no attempt to do a massed battle: it’s just two guys, fighting. The empty spaces may be the result of filming during a pandemic.
I liked the use of a figure in a black hood, possibly a minor Thane, who brings MacBeth the news that he’s become Thane of Cawdor, and personally chops off the treasonous Thane’s head. He pops up again as the mysterious Third Murderer, who help Fleance escape, and hides him until the end of the play. He's some kind of Fate, maybe an agent of the witches.
It’s static. It’s very slow. It would be a good thing to show to students who were doing Macbeth at school and weren’t sure if they could follow the plot. It’s very clear. It’s judiciously adapted. Some movies chop lines out of one scene and distribute them through three others; which gives those of us who know the text a headache. (See also under Jackson, Peter.) There is none of that here. Cuts there were, but I never felt I was watching an adaptation.
I did think it was a pity that the sequence in which Macduff visits Malcolm (the kings son, and heir apparent) in England was so heavily pruned. I am a little spoiled because in Bristol we have Shakespeare At The Tobacco Factory, an actors ensemble that like to illuminate the tiny nooks and crannies of a play, rather than go for the set piece and the star vehicle. They love to take the long difficult scenes and tease the dramatic potential out of them. They made me understand that the Macduff / Malcolm scene is almost the only piece of drama in the play: the moment where Shakespeare is doing what he does best, getting inside the heads of two human consciousnesses. Macduff has to persuade Malcom: it’s time to come and defeat MacBeth; he killed your Dad, he’s doing terrible things in Scotland; come and help us. And then of course the news comes through that MacBeth has killed Macduff’s children because he’s there consorting with Malcolm. That was cut right down: I think if I hadn’t already known the play well, it would have left me thinking “Who is MacDuff; why is Macbeth so prepared to slaughter the kids?”
Years and years ago -- I think it was a theatre workshop when I was in the Sixth Form -- I saw a drama company presenting the story of Lady Macbeth as a Greek tragedy. They put Lady Macbeth centre stage: she spoke all her lines and the rest of the cast stood in a circle like a chorus and spoke only the lines that are directly spoken to her. It only ran to about twenty minutes. For such a famous character, Lady Macbeth has a surprisingly small part. But it spotted that there is something ritualistic and fatalistic about the play.
I think this film was doing a similar thing. It thought the way to do Macbeth is to hold it at arms length: a shadow play of figures moving slowly through preordained events they can’t change, saying scripted words -- rather than to present it as a political drama about a time and a place and a man. And I was disappointed. I didn’t hate it. I didn’t think I’d wasted my time; but I didn’t think it worked.
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