Trevor Nunn's Macbeth (1979)

Macbeth was the first Shakespeare play I read in depth in school, although reading it now again, four years later, I’m rather impressed with the ability of my fourteen-year-old self to totally miss the point. I remember thinking it a fairly simple story with the moral “Don’t be too ambitious.” However, I still quite liked the play, and my affection for it has grown quite a lot over time. As you may have noticed from earlier reviews, I’m a bit of a fan of Ian McKellen, so I was super excited to see this production.

This is very much a filmed stage production; I think that’s important to establish in the beginning here. If you’re looking for something flashy, for something visually appealing, or for beautiful cinematography, look elsewhere. In fact, even if you’re just looking for moderately high production values, look elsewhere. In terms of set and costumes, it’s roughly equal to what could be accomplished in my basement. In Ian McKellen’s commentary on the production, he states quite clearly that the utter lack of sets or complicated costumes was entirely intentional. Trevor Nunn and the rest of the cast and crew made the decision that that simply was not what their version was going to be about, and so they cut it all. This is very pointedly a minimalist Macbeth, and I think it’s all the stronger for its minimalism.

However, the transfer of what they did on stage onto video left a little bit to be desired. If you knew what it was they were trying to get across, as I did my second time seeing this, it mostly makes sense, but if you are unaware of what the stage production was like, it is all just a bit confusing. In the stage play the actors all sat in a circle around the stage on chairs, and from those chairs, the offstage actors made the sound effects, helped with costume changes, and added blood to props and people as necessary. All of that happened in full view of the audience, and the entire cast was seated around the stage the entire time. During all of act five, Macbeth never left the stage, and the invading army spoke from the other side of the stage as he paced around with the shrunken head given to him by the witches. With this knowledge, a lot of previously confusing things became clear, though I think they could have been transferred to television better so as to be less confusing to viewers who haven’t done their research. By continuing to show the cast seated around the stage, even in just a couple of long shots, the first scene in which they all took their seats could have had stronger implications and made a lot more sense. Additionally, a couple of long shots in the fifth act could have made clear why the image of the shrunken head seemed to be floating over Malcolm and the rest as they invaded Scotland. While I really liked the movie’s focus on up close shots (this was, after all, a fairly unadorned character study), I think the occasional longer shot to give us a better sense of how the stage was set up could have been good for the movie.

With that out of the way, I can turn to the actual matter of the play: the stunning acting. Like the set, there is no gimmickry here. Nothing is overdone or overdramatic. The energy is kept to a seething undertone: most of the soliloquies are performed with just an up-close on the face of the actor. The focus is on the emotions and the words, and pretty much nothing else.

Had they chosen to do this with a lesser cast, it could have been a disaster. Fortunately, they had Sir Ian McKellen and Dame Judi Dench in the leading roles. They were absolutely stellar. The rest of the cast couldn’t even hold a candle to them and it didn’t matter because Ian McKellen and Judi Dench would have stolen the show from them anyway. They were both truly spectacular, and that was quite fortunate for this production, because the rest of it was, while not bad, not always outstanding either.

McKellen’s Macbeth was a rational man, gripped not so much by ambition but by a cruel, perfidious imagination that takes ahold of him almost instantly upon being fed a thought. In his tight, up close soliloquies, you can almost see the images unfolding behind his eyes, with an intensity that grips him as strongly as it does the audience. He’s a rationalist, but one whose logic and rationality lacks the strength to compete with the force of his imagination. The ‘dagger of the mind’ and Banquo’s ghost both appear to be entirely conjured up by the power of his imagination run amok, to the point that he can no longer distinguish its visions from reality. Both are entirely invisible to the audience, but McKellen’s intense belief in their reality convinces us of their power over him.

Macbeth appears only superficially interested in the entire court, with his wife as his one exception. Playing Macbeth as so cold, so detached, so wholly inward into himself, McKellen ran the risk of losing him to the audience, but his scenes with Dench gave him the depth and humanity needed to make him a character we could relate to. Through his devotion, and extremely sexual passion for her, he was humanized, and the audience understood that he was not only a ruthless killer, but also a passionate lover and husband. In their first scene together, they rush to each other’s arms, speaking their entire conversation through kisses as they revel in the sheer joy of each other’s company again. Their relationship looses intimacy with each passing scene, as the forces they unleash pull them apart. By the time Macbeth is told that she is dead, he responds with the same cold detachment with which he treats everyone else, while at the same time, adding a bitter snarl to his denouncement of life as a “walking shadow.” He’s undoubtedly affected by her death, but the Macbeth of the first act of the play would most likely have broken down in tears at the news. The destruction of their very real connection with each other emphasized the deep costs to them of their behavior, and added to the feeling of chaos descending throughout Macbeth’s rule.

Dench also played her role as not entirely evil. When she calls upon demons to give her the power to do what she feels she must, I got the sense that she genuinely would need their help, since she was not by nature a ruthless woman. Partway through her speech where she calls upon demons to make her strong, she lets out a little yelp and backs away, hands over her face. Shaking, she goes back to where she was and continues her incantation. She confesses fears and worries when alone that she refuses to tell Macbeth, and she’s genuinely horrified at his plan to kill Banquo. Part way through the banquet scene she realizes what he is referring to and what he must have done, and her stricken look leaves no doubt about her opinion of it. Her distress at their breaking relationship is extremely touching; at first they were close and deeply in love, but their relationship starts to waver when he dismisses her before he speaks with Banquo’s would-be murders. She realizes that he has something planned he’s not told her of, and she’s deeply hurt by it. In the past he’s obviously conferred with her on everything, as he did with the witches’ prophesy. As their relationship breaks apart she progressively looses composure, so her sleepwalking scene seems perfectly in keeping with the progression of her character. Her sleepwalking scene was shivers-up-the-spine good, and I genuinely felt nothing but pity for her. Despite everything she did, she was pitiable, and her suffering absolved her of at least some condemnation.

The rest of the cast was mostly good, but a little bit more mixed. The witches were interestingly ambiguous: they clearly used hallucinatory potions and drugs, for inducing both their visions and Macbeth’s, but they do also seem to have some supernatural knowledge. I think the ambiguity of the witches is a great thing about the play, and I’m glad that this production chose not to resolve it. The youngest of the three seemed to be constantly drugged up by the other two, though it took me a while to figure out that that was what they were implying. My first assumption about her writhing and screaming as they come on stage was that she was giving birth to a demon, or something like that. After later seeing their penchant for hallucinatory potions, it seemed more obvious what they were trying to do with her. Perhaps this was supposed to be intentionally confusing until later, but I found it just confusing.

Roger Rees as Malcolm was very interesting, because his “confession” of his sins to Macduff came across as very much a symptom of some real self-hatred he had, founded or not. While obviously the extent of his depravity is nowhere near what he described, he was certainly a character with a lot of personal issues that he didn’t get to resolve. It was certainly in doubt whether he would make a good king. The one strange thing in his character is that he was played as rather effeminate and weak-willed, and yet Malcolm is the one who urges Macduff to “dispute it like a man”. Not a major issue, but still a little strange.

John Woodvine’s Banquo was never really the bosom friend of Macbeth’s I often imagined: he clearly distrusted Macbeth from the beginning, but he gained sympathy with the audience from his few short scenes with Fleance, in which he was clearly a doting father.

The drunken Porter as played by Ian McDiarmid was certainly drunk, but I felt that he was played with too much comedy and without enough darkness. The Porter should make you laugh uncomfortably, wondering if he really is guarding the gates of Hell itself, but McDiarmid’s performance didn’t even make me laugh, largely because he affected so strong an accent that I had a lot of trouble understanding him. He also played Ross, so I understood the need to obscure that fact, but the accent was far too thick and covered up any nuance there may have been in his performance.

Bob Peck’s Macduff was mostly good throughout, but I thought at the end he was far too tame. He never seemed properly horrified or devastated at the loss of his family and his anger at Macbeth never seemed brutal enough. Understatement mostly worked well throughout, but here it took the air out of a scene that should be one of the most moving in the play. That contributed to what I felt was one of the main problems of the play: the ending.

Throughout most of the play, only tiny amounts of text were cut. However, in act five, they decided to cut huge swaths of it for no apparent reason. Perhaps they thought if they sped up the action if would be more dramatic, but to me it felt truncated and sudden. The credits rolled and I wondered if my DVD had skipped some of it because of damage or an error. Overall, it felt like there wasn’t enough buildup to the Macduff/Macbeth swordfight, and when it did happen, it was cut short as well, because most of it took place off screen. They start sparring after Macduff announces that he was a c-section baby, and then they run off stage. We only hear about the outcome from Macduff. To me, it left a hollow feeling to the ending, both because of how rushed the entire last act was, and because the swordfight was so downplayed and tame. It was better on the second watch-through, when I spent less time being confused about the floating shrunken head, but the ending just struck a wrong note with me, leaving the entire thing with a slightly sour feeling.

However, overall, I found this to be an outstanding production. Not everything worked, but the things that did work worked fantastically. If you want a simple production with a focus on Shakespeare’s words and nothing else, this is absolutely stellar.