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

[endlessrarities.livejournal.com]

I missed it:-( J was in two minds whether to watch it or not - he doesn't like these clever-clever Shakespearean productions staged in modern dress. In the end, it was earlier than we'd expected so we watched the end of Tremors instead. Oh, how intellectual!!!

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I imagine it'll be repeated.

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.

[endlessrarities.livejournal.com]

I remember feeling heartily disappointed as a child that Julius Caesar was being played by a bunch of folk in doublets, hose, and big ruffs!!! I now kind of feel more comfortable watching it in Elizabethan dress because it just seems right that way...

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I've only been to the Globe once, but it was a revelation to see a Shakespeare play being performed on Shakespeare's own stage under something like the original conditions.

[endlessrarities.livejournal.com]

I can imagine that would have spectacular!

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

The main thing about the Globe is that performances take place in daylight. The actors can see the audience. There's much more interaction between stage and pit than is possible in any modern theatre. When an actor delivers a soliloquy it's like he's doing stand-up. The modern Globe audience is fairly polite, but I'm sure that in Shakespeare's day they'd have heckled.

[endlessrarities.livejournal.com]

They probably threw missiles, too, if things weren't quite to their liking!!

Ah, theatre critics...

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

The experience also taught me why Shakespeare used so many words. It's because a lot of them wouldn't have been audible.