Patrick Stewart's Macbeth

[poliphilo]

I 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. 

Comments

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I sympathise. I nearly bailed out early too. It's a flashy, silly production, but worth persevering with for the sake of the performances. Stewart is a great Macbeth.

[ron-broxted.livejournal.com]

Yes I agree about Patrick (he even sent me a join Amnesty for Xmas ad, odd as I have been in for 25 years). I just had no time for silly gimmicks "re-imagining" the play. Like Titus Andronicus a few years back set in f**king Wall St!

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

The David Tennant Hamlet used modern dress without making a fetish of it. It's worth remembering that Shakespeare used contemporary (Elizabethan/Jacobean) dress for all his plays. Burbage's Macbeth would have strutted the stage in doublet and hose.

But mainly I agree. Shakespeare doesn't need to be "re-imagined" to speak to a modern audience.

[ron-broxted.livejournal.com]

It is just if it s Julius Caesar = togas, no need for gimmicks. Never got to see Tennant's Hamlet.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I saw the RSC's most recent Julius Caesar. It was full of gimmicks- even though togas were worn- and pretty damn bad. I heard from an insider that the actors themselves hated the production.

[ron-broxted.livejournal.com]

Big egos small room. Actors gay and straight are the bitchiest folks on earth.