Patrick Stewart's Macbeth
Dec. 13th, 2010 02:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
poliphiloI watched Patrick Stewart's Macbeth last night. It's an opened up version of a lauded stage production- and full of the kind of expressionist touches that work very well on stage, but not so well on film. The world of the production is a bewildering hotch-potch of times and places and cultures. The characters wear Stalinist uniforms and 1940s evening dress; the Macbeths live in an English country house with a Hitlerian bunker, hang out mainly in the kitchen and serve the meals themselves like a modern power couple; Lady MacDuff and her children are murdered in a tiled space that is clearly labelled Ladies Changing Room; the witches are military nurses who use bits of their deceased patients in their spells; the weaponry is modern, but Malcolm leads his army from the front like a medieval warlord. It's a very clever production- and would have been a better movie if three quarters of the clever stuff had been cut.
Stewart is magnificent. I thought he might be a little too old for the role, but he must be the buffest, most vigorous seventy year old on the planet. He has the menace, he has the bluff manly charm, he has the inner panic. It's a genuinely illuminating performance. This, you come away thinking, is what dictators are like; this is what Stalin was like, this is what Mao was like. Susan Fleetwood as Lady Macbeth is haunted and haunting.
Unlike every other Shakespeare play of this stature Macbeth is short on great acting roles; the thane and his wife move among shadows. That said, the supporting cast is terrific- and Michael Feast turns that old ram-rod MacDuff into a proper human being. The scene in which he receives the news of his family's death- and gulps silently for breath and composure- is joltingly painful.
Stewart is magnificent. I thought he might be a little too old for the role, but he must be the buffest, most vigorous seventy year old on the planet. He has the menace, he has the bluff manly charm, he has the inner panic. It's a genuinely illuminating performance. This, you come away thinking, is what dictators are like; this is what Stalin was like, this is what Mao was like. Susan Fleetwood as Lady Macbeth is haunted and haunting.
Unlike every other Shakespeare play of this stature Macbeth is short on great acting roles; the thane and his wife move among shadows. That said, the supporting cast is terrific- and Michael Feast turns that old ram-rod MacDuff into a proper human being. The scene in which he receives the news of his family's death- and gulps silently for breath and composure- is joltingly painful.
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no subject
Date: 2010-12-13 02:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-13 02:55 pm (UTC)I have always regretted...
Date: 2010-12-13 04:05 pm (UTC)Re: I have always regretted...
Date: 2010-12-13 04:15 pm (UTC)I've seen David Warner and David Tennant on stage- and several more in other media.
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Date: 2010-12-13 04:16 pm (UTC)I am very glad; I have not yet seen this production, but based on his Claudius in Tennant's Hamlet, I've been really wanting to.
What would you have cut?
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Date: 2010-12-13 05:06 pm (UTC)I'm an admirer of Trevor Nunn's Macbeth- with McKellen and Dench- a minimalist production filmed in a black space with a lot of close-ups and a fierce concentration on the text. Nunn's witches are a team- a young woman who channels the spirits and two older ones who control her. Nunn knows who his witches are and exactly what they're doing- and their lines (which Goold rushes through because he can't be bothered) make sense. Goold's production is full of unthinking theatrical bravura, but Nunn's is intelligent.
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Date: 2010-12-13 05:30 pm (UTC)Gotcha. If they are not meant to be choosers of life and death, for example, or gore-crows gathered at the battlefield, then it's just fitting them into the period.
I'm an admirer of Trevor Nunn's Macbeth- with McKellen and Dench- a minimalist production filmed in a black space with a lot of close-ups and a fierce concentration on the text.
I saw the tape of that. I can't imagine it had the same effect onscreen as in the theater, where I think it must have been nearly unbearable, like falling into a black hole, but it was very powerful.
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Date: 2010-12-13 05:53 pm (UTC)And the focus on period was fairly wobbly. We seemed to be in the 30s or 40s, but the Porter- a yob in a tee shirt and not the liveried retainer you might expect the Macbeths to employ- began his scene slumped in front of the telly.
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Date: 2010-12-13 05:59 pm (UTC)Yeah: very much the sort of thing that works onstage, where the resonances are what matter, not the precise reconstruction of a time, but not on film where you expect to believe the mise-en-scène and you have to be Peter Greenaway or Derek Jarman to get away with the alternative. It still sounds as though it was worth being filmed, for the lead performances.
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Date: 2010-12-13 06:24 pm (UTC)Exactly.
This is why there are so very few really good filmed versions of Shakespeare.
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Date: 2010-12-13 06:37 pm (UTC)Which ones do you think work? Off the top of my head I seem to think first of Prospero's Books and Ian McKellen's Richard III (1995), both of which succeed in part by not aiming for the usual realism—the Greenaway is a deconstruction-retelling, McKellen's an alternate history. My favorite Hamlet may still be Kozintsev's, in Russian.
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Date: 2010-12-13 07:14 pm (UTC)Welles' Chimes at Midnight is a masterpiece- and contains the best medieval battle scene in the movies ever.
I'm fond of Olivier's Hamlet- a skewed but intelligent version of the play- with loads of atmosphere.
Kurosawa's Throne of Blood is magnificent, but I'm not sure if it counts.
Finally I'm really rather partial to Trevor Nunn's Twelfth Night- largely because Nunn has this gift of making Shakespearian verse sound like real conversation.
I haven't seen Prospero's Books. Mckellen's Richard III didn't do it for me- though I thought the way the opening speech modulated from public oratory to private monologue was brilliant.
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Date: 2010-12-13 07:54 pm (UTC)I have never seen it. So noted.
Finally I'm really rather partial to Trevor Nunn's Twelfth Night- largely because Nunn has this gift of making Shakespearian verse sound like real conversation.
I forgot about that one! Yes. Also beautiful painterly cinematography, which I would not necessarily have guessed Nunn had the eye for.
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Date: 2010-12-13 08:07 pm (UTC)It's extraordinary how Welles is at once so very famous and so badly neglected. If Chimes at Midnight and the Trial and F for Fake were more widely available people might stop wittering about how he lost his way after Citizen Kane.
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Date: 2010-12-13 08:12 pm (UTC)Criterion, this year, released F for Fake. I've never been able to get hold of The Trial, although I've been curious about it for years.
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Date: 2010-12-13 08:29 pm (UTC)The Trial is a strange film- very far from my idea of Kafka, but fascinating nonetheless- with a great, nervy, lead performance from Tony Perkins.
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Date: 2010-12-13 05:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-13 05:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-13 08:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-13 08:18 pm (UTC)But mainly I agree. Shakespeare doesn't need to be "re-imagined" to speak to a modern audience.
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Date: 2010-12-15 04:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-15 05:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-16 03:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-13 05:12 pm (UTC)The last production I saw, the three witches were two men and a woman.
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Date: 2010-12-13 05:18 pm (UTC)I saw Macbeth on stage in my teens in a production chiefly distinguished by the presence of the young Tom Courtney as Malcolm.
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Date: 2010-12-13 05:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-13 05:55 pm (UTC)This production was fairly brutal too in its use of violence, though it spared us the full-frontal child murder.
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Date: 2010-12-13 05:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-13 06:18 pm (UTC)Shakespeare's own practice was to play everything in contemporary (Elizabethan/Jacobean) dress. Putting Macbeth in 2Oth century battledress is no more outlandish really than putting him in carefully researched early medieval armour.
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Date: 2010-12-13 06:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-13 07:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-13 07:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-13 08:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-13 08:27 pm (UTC)Ah, theatre critics...
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Date: 2010-12-13 08:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-13 09:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-13 09:54 pm (UTC)