Kenneth Branagh's Henry V (1989)

This was the first of Branagh’s string of Shakespeare movies, and is justifiably regarded as one of his best. Released in 1989, it set off a wave of Shakespeare film adaptations, and is often credited with beginning the revival of the genre. Both because of its quality and its significance for the genre, this is a very impressive movie.

Despite major issues with the makeup department, it is very well-visualized overall. Branagh stuck to extreme realism in the sets and costumes, aiming to look as authentically medieval Europe as possible. He achieved that hard-to-define quality of looking genuine instead of costumey, and this sort of raw authenticity was really important in defining how he told Harry’s story. This was most apparent in way the battle scenes were done: there was no idealized, glamorous battle here. Harry could give as many motivating speeches as he liked, but at the end, war was dirty, chaotic and bloody, and at the end of the Battle of Agincourt, Harry was feeling just as defeated as the French were. As his army trekked through France, they became increasingly demotivated, dirty, sick and exhausted, until his men looked like a sorry excuse for an army by the time Agincourt rolled around. The realism was reflected in acting style, costuming, sets and interpretation, and helped to elevate it from the mindless British propaganda that Henry V can become.

One flaw in this realism was a slight tendency to veer into excessive dramatics. The speech at the beginning of the Battle of Harfleur was an especially bad offender; the yelling and face-pulling was just too much and didn’t work. However, the other big speeches worked extremely well. Branagh’s Crispian’s Day speech was wonderful because he reined in the dramatics and delivered it with some real feeling. Not only was it well-delivered, it was extremely stirring, even for me, a pacifist who is the least likely person to be stirred by a call to war. Part of the effect was no doubt due to the rousing music, but Branagh’s performance perfectly toed the line between public address and personal conviction. His men gathered around him, wonderstruck, and I felt like I was among them, elbowing the men closest to me to get closer to the hero giving this great speech. The success of his Crispian’s Day speech shows how misguided his dramatics in the Harfleur speech were; as with the rest of the movie, personalized realism was the most effective.

One thing I disliked in this movie was the way scenes from Henry IV were introduced. They wanted to use them to set up Harry’s character better, as a man with a past he had recently repudiated, but it didn’t work because they didn’t do enough of it. There weren’t enough scenes with Falstaff and his companions for their relationship with Harry to become clear, so the significance of his rejection of them didn’t come through. It doesn’t matter how well you do it, if you show a relationship for three minutes, the ending of it won’t feel important or emotionally significant (Unless you’re Pixar and the movie is Up). They either needed to go full out and include a lot from the earlier plays to establish his past, or cut those parts. As they were, they seemed slightly insignificant and extraneous. They also gave a couple of Falstaff’s lines to Bardolph and set them in a different context than they were in Henry IV, changing their meaning significantly. They included Harry’s exchange with Falstaff about hanging thieves from 1.2 of Henry IV Part I, but they gave Falstaff’s lines to Bardolph and made it a public conversation, so it came off as a serious declaration that Harry would hang Bardolph when he was king. I didn’t think it worked very well, and it seemed to be a little bit dishonest to what the lines were actually referring to.

However, I thought Harry’s reaction to the hanging of Bardolph was well done, and demonstrated how torn he is between his kingly duties and his personal allegiances. That split in loyalty and duty ran through Harry’s character throughout the play, and helped show how he clearly grew and changed as the story progressed. Instead of being just an example of a “noble” king in a patriotic tale, he was a real character who the audience invested in as more than just the leader of the army.

In the beginning he sets the character up very well: he’s young and has a high opinion of himself, with his dramatic entrance and his confident, almost cocky slouch as he sits in his throne. However, he’s also intelligent and an adept leader, which he demonstrates with his cold resolve and calculation, and his ability to bring the nobles into his plans and make them feel included in the war effort. He undoubtedly has their loyalty, and he proves himself wily enough to eliminate those who are not loyal.

However, he also has a special inwardness: a sense that he is isolated, betrayed and introverted, despite his ability to put on a show and deliver a great speech. At times he seems almost Hamletesque; his real motivations always remain opaque. Branagh chose to portray him unironically, but he is neither a heartless, callow machiavel nor a wholly sympathetic character. He toes the line between viciousness and tenderness, calculation and sentiment. He’s not only a king torn between the necessities of his job and his real desires, he’s also a man naturally split between these two competing instincts. They went out of their way to show his nastier side: he flies into rages at tiny slights, he tricks his friends into confessing their guilt, he orders the murder of the French prisoners, and he silently assents to the hanging of Bardolph. However, by taking the pains to portray his vulnerable human side, Branagh creates a character who is defined by more than just his actions, and who is genuinely sympathetic. By the end of the movie he is both a better leader and a better man, though the character is still deeply ambiguous.

Harry is really the only major character in this play, but skilled actors demonstrated throughout that a small part does not have to be an insignificant one.

Derek Jacobi nearly stole the show, and he was playing the Chorus. I hadn’t thought it possible to do much with the part of Chorus; even when I’ve seen Gielgud play the chorus, he was pretty dull. Miraculously, Jacobi’s chorus was never boring, and at times risked being more interesting than what was actually going on. He framed the entire movie as a story and therefore not real, which would have had the effect of pulling the audience a little bit away from its horrifying realism, if it weren’t for the fact that he was in on all the action. He was watching from a distance as Henry executed his three traitor friends, he was at the Battle of Harfleur, dirt-covered and laying in the mud, he walked under Bardolph’s dangling body and slowly shook his head. By first setting him up clearly as the story-teller who talked directly to the audience about the nature of this story, and then throwing him into the midst of it, the movie acknowledged that we were the audience and then brought us with him into fifteenth century England. In a way, we followed him along as he physically journeyed through this story-world.

Emma Thompson was a lively, charming Katherine, and she played the role with enough of a sense of autonomy and independence that her marriage to Harry didn’t feel like quite as much of a spoils-of-war marriage as it can. She also afforded the play both of its two brief moments of humor, mainly at her attempts to learn English and her miscommunication with Harry at the end. Though it’s questionable how happy their marriage will be, her natural chemistry with Branagh and her portrayal of her charmed reaction to him make the final scene significantly less uncomfortable than it is on page.

Judi Dench lent quite a bit of weight to the small role of Mistress Quickly, and was one of the major redeeming factors in the scenes discussing Falstaff’s death. The significance and extremity of her reaction was the only thing in those scenes that brought any reaction out of the audience, since it’s generally a bit tough to get too worked up about the death of a character who hasn’t been introduced yet. However, her beautiful acting wrung some real pathos out of it, and out of the leaving of Bardolph, Pistol and Nym.

The entire French court was excellently done, with each actor leaving a distinct impression of character despite the few lines they had. Paul Scofield was the depressive king, defeated almost from the get-go and slowly caving under the pressure of his bold, impatient son. Michael Maloney as the Dauphin was exactly the sort of man who would sent a gift of tennis balls to his touchiest enemy, and he spent the whole time chafing against his more restrained, defeatist father. He made a formidable enemy for Henry to face, and he didn’t come off as a caricature of a Frenchman.

Christopher Ravenscroft as Montjoy had a real presence on screen, and with his slowly developing respect for Harry, he became much more than a setpiece character. Because of his relationship to Harry developing over time, he made real magic out of what was one of the most impressive scenes in the film. After the battle of Agincourt that seemed to stretch on forever in dirty, horrible chaos, Montjoy came to greet the English, and Harry was forced to admit that he did not know who had won the day. In the confusion, it would have been impossible. But when Montjoy told him that he had won, it was clearly with utter respect for his enemy king. The two of them together made the moment sheer magic.

In my opinion, this is one of the best Shakespeare movie adaptations out there, both for narrative structure and excellent acting all around. What flaws there were, were more than made up for by the rest of the brilliance around them.

Trevor Nunn's Twelfth Night (1996)

I love Twelfth Night and I love Trevor Nunn, so I was very excited to see this movie. I thought that it was sure to be a winning combination, so I had very high expectations as I sat down to watch it with my sister. When it was over, she announced that she liked it better than Kenneth Branagh’s Twelfth Night, and despite a couple of reservations, I think I have to agree with her.

Nunn opened with a scene on the boat in which Viola and Sebastian are singing and doing a magic act in drag, followed by the storm and breakup of the boat. The whole thing was narrated by Feste, who stood on the shore and watched solemnly. I actually liked the opening sequence, because it established Viola and Sebastian’s identities in relationship to each other, and set their close bond early on, so that when they were reunited later, it really had some impact. I even liked that Feste was on the cliff watching the everything, since it gave his position as the observer of the whole story more depth. He even picked up the necklace that Viola shed and returned it to her when her identity was revealed. However, I cannot, for the life of me, understand why Nunn chose to add lines for Feste’s narration. Here’s a tip for anyone adapting Shakespeare: if you’re tempted to add lines of your own, don’t. You are not as good a poet as Shakespeare, and you will sound either silly or stupid or both. That’s really all there is to say about it. There’s no reason why those sequences needed narration to explain them: they would have been perfectly self-explanatory if just done silently.

The text was considerably re-arranged, and for the most part, the re-arrangement worked well. It allowed the relationship between Viola and Orsino to develop more gradually, provided a mini-climax by placing Viola and Orisno’s fight about women’s ability to love right before Viola goes to try to woo Olivia again, only to find out she is married to Sebastian, and it inter-cut between a lot of scenes to give a better sense of when things happened in relation to each other. The cuts were broad but not deep: little bits of almost every scene were lost, but nothing was lost in its whole, and I didn’t feel that the spirit of anything was eliminated or altered by the cuts. The couple of times I found myself feeling shocked that a passage was cut, it always turned up later. Overall, the cuts and re-arrangements served to make it more cinematic and quickly paced, and though I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the scene order as Shakespeare wrote it, there wasn’t anything wrong with this one either.

The setting was generically nineteenth century Europe, a period that worked fairly well for this story. Olivia lived at a beautiful villa with expansive gardens, and Orsino in a lavish castle. The beauty of the scene set up what is essentially a festive love comedy, but crashing waves on rocky, dangerous shores surrounded all of Illyria. I thought the set-up of Illyria simultaneously being a military state and an Edenically beautiful place was a nice juxtaposition.

Imogen Stubbs brought everything to the role that Francis Barber (the Viola in the Twelfth Night I previously reviewed) did not. She was lively, witty and charming, so it was no mystery why Orsino and Olivia both were instantly taken with her. Everyone fancied her at least a little, and it would have been impossible not to. Because of her charm and vivacity, her sadness actually came across much better than did Barber’s, for two reasons. Primarily, because she wasn’t crying all the time, when she did become sad, the emotion came across very touchingly, not just as more of the same. Also, she was a character you had a real reason to invest in beyond the fact that she was in an unfortunate situation, so you were drawn into empathizing with her much more than Barber’s Viola.

Miraculously, despite being very feminine and gorgeous normally, she made a mostly convincing guy. Despite her quite convincing disguise, this movie chose to heavily emphasize the extent and difficulty of her costume: there were two scenes showing her either putting on or taking off her costume, showing her packing, binding and putting on a moustache. The physical pain of binding was also made clear, as was the ease with which she could have been discovered by almost any physical contact. They also took effort to show how she had to be involved in a number of the “man activities” such as fencing, riding, smoking, and playing pool and cards. The difficulty and arduousness of her disguise was emphasized throughout, which had two effects. Firstly, it illustrated the constant danger of discovery she was in and made her position with Orsino seem much more precarious. Secondly, it emphasized how neurotic a character she is, since she willingly takes this upon herself with very little reason. They attempted to make it seem that she had to disguise herself to avoid danger, but that still didn’t provide a good reason why looking like her brother was a good idea, so the fact still stood that she did it for her own not entirely rational reasons.

Stephen Mackintosh looked remarkably like Imogen Stubbs and made a decent Sebastian for her. His treatment of Antonio throughout was fairly distant, and his interest in Olivia was certainly motivated entirely by Helena Bonham-Carter’s good looks, but his grief for Viola was genuine enough, so their reunion was effective. I loved the touch of them both pulling the same vanishing coin trick with Feste and other little similarities between them that were scattered throughout movie. It really drove home that they are, in some ways, two parts of the same whole.

Toby Stephens and Helena Bonham-Carter both shone as Orsino and Olivia. Stephens’ Orsino was completely neurotic, in love with the fantasy of love and attended by a long train of followers who were thoroughly bored of his dramatics. No wonder he fell so quickly into friendship with Cesario: Cesario was the only one who would put up with him! He was self-indulgent, dramatic and shallow, but somehow never quite unlikeable because of his sheer dedication to his own silly romantic world he trued to create.

Helena Bonham-Carter had real chemistry with Imogen Stubbs, and instantly fell for Cesario, who had the unique ability to make her smile. She was plainly bored with everyone else, including Feste, and she fell for Cesario both because he was new and because, with his strange manner, he was totally different from everyone else. Her very real chemistry with the elusive Cesario made her love for him feel appropriate and not random, despite its sudden onset. Her mourning for her brother was genuine, but her promise to shut herself off from the world for years was clearly more an attempt to avoid Orsino than a real intention: she had, by no means, retreated from life. She was also a very funny Olivia: her utterly gobsmacked look throughout the last scene had me and my sister in stitches.

Mel Smith’s Sir Toby Belch felt like a very prominent character in this, as did Nicholas Farrell’s Antonio. In Branagh’s production they both faded into the background, so it was interesting to see how different actors could suddenly bring the characters into much sharper focus. I know Nicholas Farrell for playing Horatio in Branagh’s Hamlet, and here, he’s once again been cast as the ever-loyal best friend. Antonio was charmingly devoted, just enough so that I wondered if something more than friendship was at work in his feelings for Sebastian. Sebastian, in return, regarded him warmly but not lovingly, and clearly didn’t know quite what to make of Antonio’s heaping of affection. Antonio was also a man to be reckoned with: he escaped the police in Illyria, broke up a fight and insulted Orsino to his face. In the end, instead of leaving his future uncertain, the film made clear that he was released from all punishment and allowed to join in the merrymaking with the rest of the crowd.

Smith’s Sir Toby was rather malignant and not particularly into merrymaking. Instead of starting out harmless and fun, his drunkenness and antics were unpleasant from the beginning. Something about his malignancy made him stand out as the leader of the group much more than Maria did, and his presence was felt much more strongly. Despite a malignantly powerful Belch, the rest of his crowd was a little bit bland. Aguecheeck was more socially awkward than stupid, and though he was quite funny, he was far too ridiculous to be believed. Maria felt like a fairly minor character, neither particularly charming nor particularly repellent. She didn’t have the vivacity to implicate the audience in her bullying of Malvolio, and the guilt seemed to fall much more heavily on Toby Belch than on her. I didn’t like that the audience was kept at more of a distance from the mocking of Malvolio, since that rendered the final scenes with him less horrible for the audience to watch. You felt bad for him, but you didn’t feel personally guilty, as you did in the Branagh production. Overall, Imelda Staunton’s performance as Maria felt sort of invisible, especially next to the overpowering characters surrounding her, and I thought the production was much weaker for it.

I wasn’t too impressed with Nigel Hawthorne’s Malvolio either. One has to tread a fine line with him: make him too likeable and there’s none of the hilarious schadenfreude, make him too unlikeable and his fate has no impact. Hawthorne certainly leaned towards the latter of these, and his passion for Olivia didn’t seem wholehearted enough to justify his acceptance of the letter as anything other than sheer gullibility. Malvolio has to simultaneously be unlikeable and very sympathetic, and I wasn’t sure that Hawthorne hit the second of these two factors well enough. Overall, he was too much of a caricature and not enough of a character.

I adore Feste as a character, and Ben Kingsley did a good job with him, though I still prefer Anton Lesser’s performance in the Branagh Twelfth Night. He played Feste as a wandering, inward character, willing to play any part that was necessary but always keeping at a distance from everyone around him. He was very morally ambiguous- he comforted Olivia when she was sad, but he also happily dressed up as the Priest to fool Malvolio. When they initially started planning the trick for Malvolio, Feste slipped away, but he clearly hated the man as much as any of them. He knew and kept Viola’s secret for her, but he also deliberately made her uncomfortable about it when he brought up her facial hair. His ambiguity was interesting, as was the idea that he was willing to take up or shed any act that the people around him wanted him to. When he was with Maria and Toby he played them a song when they asked, danced and acted silly when they asked, and slipped away when they began plotting and had no more need of him. He dressed up as the Priest for them and then delivered Malvolio’s letter to Olivia. He seemed to be not immoral, but amoral, willing to do anything that was needed of him, and play any part that he had to. Beneath that all was the real man, who remained elusive throughout. He was loved by everybody, especially Maria and Olivia, who both cared for him deeply, and he seemed to care for them in return, albeit in a strange, detached way. He was possessed by wanderlust, always looking ready to leave at any moment, and in the opening sequence he had left the city to go sit by the cliffs for days to observe the shipwreck. At the end, he left again, singing alone to himself. When he sang he seemed to be most at peace, and most of the time when he was alone, he was humming. His songs were decently arranged, but I didn’t love all the melodies. None of them seemed like the deeply hummable kind of melodies I imagine Feste singing, but none were bad either. Kingsley has a nice though plain voice, but the far-off look that he had in his eye every time he sang was what gave each of his songs their magic. Ultimately, this Feste belonged to everyone and no one, with the real man fading to a mystery behind the roles he constantly took on and shook off.

Overall, it’s an impressive success on a number of levels. Had they avoided the urge to add to the text and given Maria the power to draw the audience into her bullying, it could have been nearly perfect. As it was, it was very good, in no small part due to remarkable performances from Imogen Stubbs, Helena Bonham-Carter, Ben Kingsley and Toby Stephens.

Kenneth Branagh's Much Ado About Nothing (1993)

This is another one of those movies to which I have a strong sentimental attachment. I remember my first time seeing it with more clarity than I remember a large portion of my childhood, because it had such an effect on me. From around the ages of six to ten, I had seen a couple of stage productions of Shakespeare plays, mostly shortened versions of comedies geared towards children. I thought the whole spectacle of going to a play was quite fun, but I had no idea what was actually happening in any of them. Shakespeare’s language could have been Ancient Anatolian for all I understood.

And then I saw this movie. I was in fifth grade, and my parents had rented it for the family to watch. I loved it. I understood what was going on, and I laughed at the humor and wordplay. So, naturally, I assumed that they weren’t using Shakespeare’s actual text, since that would have been impossible to understand. When I learned that it was actually Shakespeare’s language, it was a total epiphany for me, because, suddenly, what had once been so intimidating was understandable. Not only understandable, but funny and real and ever so fun to watch.

Before writing this review, I had seen this movie a slightly unholy number of times, and as I’ve gotten older, I’ve been able to see that there are some flaws here. Overall though, it’s a spectacular piece of work.

It opens with Beatrice, played by Emma Thompson, reading out “Sigh No More”, to a picnic being held at Messina, before the messenger comes bearing the news of Don Pedro’s arrival. Then, there’s a very long scene as the men arrive and everybody washes, changes and prepares to welcome the soldiers. I know I just posted a review railing against overuse of silent scenes, but I thought this one was very worthwhile, because it established the festive mood that was maintained through most of the play. Messina is an open, beautiful place, where everybody is put in high excitement at the prospect of welcoming guests. The whole place is vital with the excitement and community, and I think it sets the scene at the Tuscan Villa beautifully.

In some ways I think Branagh’s desire to create a festive, celebratory play ended up hurting the production, because it means the ending must be utterly joyful, erasing the darker undertones in the middle of the play to get there. For the ending to be purely happy, Claudio has to be someone that the audience can stand as Hero’s husband, and thus, his bad behavior has to be either de-emphasized or excused. Branagh attempted to do this in a couple of ways, and it kind of worked. Firstly, he cast a dreamy-eyed, romantic Robert Sean Leonard to play Claudio, who played him as unrelentingly naïve and idealized, engaging in adolescent puppy-love with Kate Beckinsdale’s innocent, adorable Hero. Casting such an utterly blameless and virginal Hero should have put more emphasis on Claudio’s cruelty, but by constantly emphasizing his all too genuine anger, grief and repentance over Hero’s devastation, Claudio seemed like as much a victim as she was.

While this did contribute to making the ending an uplifting celebration to life, I felt it was slightly dishonest to the play, because the fact that Claudio and Don Pedro instantly believe the worst of Hero is left unexamined. By portraying them as being just as much victims as Hero is, their behavior is really excused. Similarly, Hero’s ordeal seems to be portrayed as just something women must learn to put up with, since men will be men and occasionally throw you over a bench on your wedding day. I feel like the play gives an extremely negative portrayal of Claudio, and men in general, that is glossed over by this movie.

However, few movies can compare in being just a sheer joy to watch, in no small part because of Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson’s electric Beatrice and Benedick. They chose to emphasize that a previous relationship had occurred between them, especially with Beatrice’s line “I knew you of old,” which she says bitterly, after he has walked away from their fight. With that fact firmly in place, their sparring always stays just on the edge between good-natured and cruel, with neither them nor the audience quite sure which side it falls on. Despite, and perhaps because of that ambiguity, they were consistently hilarious. In addition to being far and above the funniest people in the play, they also avoided caricature, and became characters whose happiness the audience could truly invest in. They thoroughly deserved each other, and cared about each other, and I got the sense that very little changed after Don Pedro’s trick except their willingness to admit what had always been true.

There is some shuffling of the scenes, particularly in the middle of the play, but I don’t think the reorganization does much harm, and may help to drive the motion forward at a faster pace. Aside from that, the text was cut very lightly, and I felt that little of substance was lost from the cutting. I actually liked the fact that Claudio’s plan of action after seeing “Hero” with Borachio was cut. It added some suspense as to what he was going to do, and it made his treatment of her at the wedding all the more shocking.

There are really only two missteps in the movie, one of which is hardly Branagh’s fault. The first, and most major one was the casting of Keanu Reeves as Don John. I cannot, for the life of me, fathom what was going through his head when he made that decision. Reeves was very rightfully nominated for a Golden Raspberry award for his performance, as it was truly awful. I didn’t ever quite get the sense that he knew what his lines meant. However, Don John coming off as stupid isn’t all bad, since he really is a second-rate villain, and the part is small enough that it was easily overlookable in the context of the rest of the movie, which was pretty uniformly fantastic.

The other error was Michael Keaton’s Dogberry, who was simply not funny. Part of that is that Dogberry as a character is not particularly funny, especially in contrast to the rest of the Grade A humor in this play. However, I have seen Dogberry played well, but Keaton wasn’t up to it. All of his humor was overdone and frankly rather tiresome. So, he’s pretending to ride a horse. He walks into things. He falls asleep while talking. He farts. It’s pretty dull stuff. I spent every moment he was on screen wishing we could get back to the interesting bits and watch Beatrice and Benedick argue some more. Part of it was that I found him very difficult to understand, since he says his words with just enough of a mumble that noticing the linguistic mistakes Dogberry makes is very difficult. In a character whose entire sense of humor is verbal play, making the words difficult to understand is fairly unforgiveable. His only funny scenes were the ones where he was talking to Leonato, but those were only funny because of Richard Briers’ gorgeous comic timing with his reactions to Dogberry’s idiocy.

Despite some casting errors and the avoidance of the play’s more serious issues by making Claudio sympathetic, I thought the movie was fantastically enjoyable and well done. Perhaps as a serious interpretation of the play it was lacking, but in my mind it made up for it by just being pure fun from start to finish.

Geoffrey Wright's Macbeth (2006)

So, this is one of those “updated” Shakespeare movies, done up for “the current generation” and “young people”. So of course that means rock music, blood, sex, nudity, guns and drugs. That’s not necessarily bad, but it has to be well thought through, not just tacked on to the play any old way. Here we’ve got Macbeth set in a gang run by Duncan and his cronies in Melbourne, Australia. It works fairly well as a setting for Macbeth, but I couldn’t help but feel a little patronized to throughout the production because it was so obviously trying so hard to be “appealing” to young people. I don’t want to get into a rant right now about my feelings on the concept of having to gear Shakespeare productions or films specifically for young people, so instead I’ll just say that I find it quite insulting and entirely wrong-headed.

Had it been done well, I think the setting could have actually worked quite well. I think the power struggles, backhandedness and disreputability of Duncan’s court lend themselves well to a gang setting. It also served to set Macbeth up as far from saintly from the very beginning. In the first scene, Macbeth is shown in battle, ruthlessly shooting down and stabbing members from a rival gang. After the first fight is cleared up, Macbeth and Banquo march into Cawdor (what appears to be a club and bar) and tie up the owner. After he’s tied and gagged, they pour themselves drinks and take some drugs while waiting for Duncan to come by. Most modern people have a strong aversion to violence of this sort, particularly if acquisition of property is the only motive, so it establishes Macbeth as a brutal anti-hero from the very beginning. The fact that Duncan is also a violent drug lord, as is everybody else involved, takes the moral question out of it. Macbeth is not any worse than any of the people he kills nor is Malcolm about to go turn the gang into a non-profit charity when he takes over. Because we don’t feel that there is a moral reason why Macbeth shouldn’t be leader, the focus is entirely on him as a character, and the effects of his actions on his psyche.

The only main logical issue with the setting was that, as far as I know, leadership of drug gangs is not patrilineal, so Macbeth’s concern that his future sons will not be leaders seems a little strange. It was a small enough problem that I was willing to suspend my disbelief. The other issues they got around in a couple of different ways. They replaced the word “England” with “seaward” so, instead of going to England, Malcolm and Macduff went and sat on a boat by the docks (why that made them safe from Macbeth is anyone’s guess). When Birnam Wood came to Dunsinane, the invaders rode in on a truck of lumber labeled “Birnam Wood”. Okay, whatever. I feel like directors of modern adaptations spend too much time patting themselves on the back about “clever” things like that. It mostly cohered, provided you were willing to suspend your disbelief about a patrilineal drug gang.

So the setting could have worked, and it certainly had some interesting effects, but I think in his frantic desire to “appeal” to young people Wright overdid it pretty much the whole way through.

One of the most readily apparent features of this Macbeth is the constant use of silent scenes to show things instead of having them happen offstage and be recounted by the characters, as is done in the original text. The opening is a long string of silent scenes, broken up by only brief exchanges of words. First we see the three witches, played by three attractive adolescent looking girls, running through a graveyard smashing and defacing statues and gravestones. They briefly agree where to meet again before exiting. The Macbeths enter and put flowers on a fresh grave with the words “beloved son” on it. Then we see the gang pull a boat up to the docks, hand over bags of what is probably drugs, and motor away. The men carry the drugs to a meeting spot, exchange them for money with the other gang, realize a foul and begin shooting. The battle goes on for a while, then Macbeth and Banquo drive away and go into Cawdor, and tie up the owner. All of that happened in the first fifteen minutes of the movie, and only about three lines were said. It picks up the pace after that, but throughout, a large portion of the story is told through silent sequences.

Wright decided that dramatizing everything that Shakespeare left up to imagination in the play makes for a more exciting movie. Thus, we get to see (in gory detail) the first fight, the execution of the Thane of Cawdor, Macbeth killing Duncan, Lady Macbeth smearing blood on the guards, and all the other scenes that are only described after the fact in the text. My problem with doing this is that it meant that the characters lose the chance to tell what happened from their perspective. Perhaps Wright felt that if he showed it, having the character describe it would be redundant, but a significant part of Macbeth’s character is lost if he doesn’t get to describe his murder of Duncan to his wife, as it is with all characters who are describing significant events in the play. The way they choose to talk about these things is important, and I didn’t think it was good to lose that in exchange for overwrought fight scenes and too much fake blood.

The other, and perhaps bigger reason for the extended silent scenes is that Wright gets to make things happen that not only do not happen in the text, but are not even hinted at in the text. Lady Macbeth cries over her son’s grave, Banquo vomits after the fight, drugs are exchanged and taken, Macbeth returns home to find Lady Macbeth unconscious in a bathtub, apparently from a failed suicide attempt, Fleance wanders through the final battle scene and shoots Lady Macbeth’s servant, Banquo’s murderers get captured and brutally killed by Malcolm and Macduff, Angus gets his jugular slit by Malcolm, Lady Macbeth dances and flirts with Duncan when he comes to their house, and all sorts of other additions. Some seemed worthwhile to me, such as the extended silent relationship developed between Fleance and Macduff in the second half of the play. Fleance’s large silent part added a human element to a movie often lacking that, as he was truly sympathetic and actually a victim of events that weren’t of his own making. His relationship with Macduff was both charming and frightening, since Fleance was clearly losing quite a bit of his childhood to be a part of this brutal gang.

Most of the time though, the made-up silent scenes felt gratuitous and unnecessary. One example of that are the scenes they added on with Lady Macbeth. They added scenes of her crying over her son’s grave, attempting to commit suicide in the first act, snorting cocaine, and reacting with tears to the death of Lady Macduff. Perhaps they felt that this added depth and motivation to her character, but I didn’t find it particularly illuminating. If you just let her say all her lines, and make sure you’ve got a brilliant actress, you don’t need any of that to make the character cohere. Their problem was that they cut massive amounts of text and were then compelled to add in silent scenes to make the characters make sense. Except, of course, that the silent scenes didn’t add much as the real text would have, thematically or character-wise.

Not only were the descriptions of events cut, but massive amounts of the text were cut, re-organized, given to different speakers or slightly reworded. Almost no entire speeches were left in the text, and dialogue was transposed between characters and speeches with such promiscuous frequency that figuring out where it was supposed to be in the text was almost impossible. I actually gave up following along partway through the first act. A lot of the nobles in Macbeth are fairly indistinguishable from each other, so some of that wasn’t too serious a transgression, but a lot of Macduff’s and Malcolm’s lines were switched around and given to other characters too. Whole soliloquies were cut, especially noticeably Macbeth’s soliloquy where he resolves that “the very firstlings of my heart shall be the firstlings of my hand.” His soliloquy in reaction to his wife’s death is also chopped up. Most of it is left unsaid after he finds her dead, and is instead read in voiceover after the battle is over. It turns it from a reflection on her death into the last lines of the play, and thus a reflection on the entire play and especially on the slaughter that just happened.

The entire Porter scene was cut, because Wright stated that he viewed it as only filler to allow the main characters to change costume, and was therefore unnecessary in a film production. I don’t think he could be more wrong about that scene. In general, when one of Shakespeare’s fools speaks, it’s best to listen, and I think that’s definitely the case with the Porter. On it’s surface, it’s a brilliant juxtaposition of comedy with horror on either side of it. However, the “comedy” is really the Porter saying “Welcome to Hell!” Not exactly filler material in my opinion. I think my bigger problem, though, was the careless attitude with which Wright chose to dismiss it, because I think that carelessness was emblematic of the way he treated all of the text.

The extreme cutting and re-arrangement of the text was unfortunate, but the bits of text that were included didn’t seem to have any poetry in them. Sam Worthington is not a Shakespearean trained actor, and it shows through very, very clearly. He delivered most of his lines in a slightly monotonic drawl, seeming very much a drugged out, less than intelligent gangster. They were aiming for a naturalistic delivery of the lines, but lost all the poetry and a lot of the beauty along the way. Macbeth has a beautiful, poetic imagination, with enough strength to totally capture his entire person in it, but with the poetry gone from his words (and many of his words gone too), that imaginative power didn’t come through at all.

In addition to butchering the text, the movie was full of contrivances that seemed inserted just to “attract a modern audience”. That, of course, means violence, blood, sex and drugs. The violence is, I think, a necessary part of the play, since Macbeth is inherently a violent play. The main character is a serial murder, and it ends in a battle. However, the violence here felt like just too much. We didn’t need to see blood spurting out of Angus’s jugular, or oozing gunshot wounds or gallons of blood on Duncan’s sheets. A certain level of violence is necessary to accurately portray the play, but excessive violence on this level is not. One of the very violent scenes that I felt was warranted was the killing of Lady Macduff, where she was garroted with a wire. I think that scene needs to be shocking, horrible and difficult to watch, and the violence there felt relevant to the point that that scene is trying to make, and not just gruesome for gruesome’s sake.

Nudity was also overused in the movie, to little positive effect. Lady Macbeth was naked throughout her sleepwalking scene and suicide. Why? I’m not sure. I have no inherent objection to nudity, I just think it has to be used wisely, and only with a very clear reason in mind. I couldn’t quite think of why having her naked was necessary in this scene, or what it communicated. Perhaps it was to her desolation and the casting off of the rich clothing she usually wore, but in that case a t-shirt would have worked just as well. The fact that they had her do a large amount of writhing around and shaking makes me think it was only for the sake of nudity and not furthering the play in any way.

The second encounter with the witches was another overuse of nudity and sex, and one of the two lowest points of the movie for me. I watched it several times and I just couldn’t figure out what Wright was trying to get at. For the first encounter, Macbeth took some drugs and then ran into some creepy young vandals when he was at Cawdor club. It worked acceptably, and I thought having him be very high for the encounter added to the believability of a modern man taking seriously three girls who claim to be witches. The second encounter I just couldn’t get my head around. I honestly have no idea what they were going for. The witches broke into his house, naked, then brewed up a potion literally composed of all of the ingredients they list, and then each drank it before offering a sip to Macbeth. This would appear to be a hallucinogen (though I don’t think any of those ingredients have that effect) because the movie then launched into a psychdelic, pseudo-pornographic sequence, in which he had an orgy with the “witches” as they moaned out their prophecies. As I said above, there has to be a valid artistic reason to include nudity and sex scenes in movies, and attracting teenage boys with the prospect of naked women is not a good enough reason. Wright said of them that he “made the witches more intriguing- to Macbeth- as sexy young vixens.” Okay, perhaps that’s understandable. A young mafia lord is perhaps more likely to be interested by them than by old hags, but the sex scene that stretched for nearly five minutes? Unnecessary and gratuitous. It was entirely unclear what they were trying to achieve with this. Were the witches supposed to be actual witches, because their potion ingredients were not metaphors for anything, but entirely literal? Was the sequence supposed to be real or hallucinated? Were the witches really privy to some secrets of the universe, or were they just young vandals looking to mess with someone? How did they even get into his heavily secured estate? Their bodies were covered with strange, black tattoos, was that supposed to hint that they were truly otherworldly? Why were they naked when they brewed the potion? Why did an extensive sex scene help to illuminate the incident? I don’t know, and I’m not sure anybody did. Young people like nudity, right?

The other low point was the final battle, in which Wright seemed to be under the impression that a scene becomes more dramatic and exciting in direct proportion to the amount of slow-motion used. It was actually difficult to follow what was going on because the scene was slowed down so much, and instead of being dramatic, it was laughable.

There were a couple of good points in the movie. One, as I mentioned above, was the extensive silent role for Fleance that emphasized, almost more than Macbeth’s story, the costs of this lifestyle. One other scene I thought was good was the banquet scene where Macbeth sees Banquo’s ghost. Along the walls of the dining room were long mirrors, and the ghost was visible to Macbeth in the mirrors, standing directly behind him and later trying to strangle him. The image of Banquo’s pale, tall ghost standing behind him was startling and memorable. As Macbeth lost his touch with reality the camera tipped wildly from side to side, giving the whole scene a mad, hallucinatory feeling to it. I also appreciated the scene where Lady Macduff was killed- it was one place where I felt that the brutal violence worked in the movie’s favor. She was garroted after being forced to watch her son die, and while difficult to watch, I felt like the brutality served a very clear purpose in showing Macbeth’s descent into complete depravity.

Overall, I thought parts of it and certain ideas were very good. The gang setting was actually an interesting twist on the story, and a couple of the scenes were quite good, especially the banquet scene with Banquo’s ghost. Had they treated the text with a bit more respect and made sure each additional silent scene had a real purpose, it could have been good, or at least better than this.

Kenneth Branagh's Twelfth Night (1988)

I typically associate Kenneth Branagh’s Shakespeare with massive sets and budgets, star-studded casting and him doubling up as director and lead, all of which can have a variety of effects. Sometimes it’s very good, sometimes it’s very mixed, and sometimes it’s a little bit painful. However, this was nothing like what I expected. He stuck to directing this time, and the sets were fairly low-key: nice, but average looking, and clearly not made with the budget of his later films.

Branagh’s main conception with the set design was to set up what he described as a Dickensian Christmasland, as a beautiful snowy place where the faults and problems lay beneath the beautiful exterior. Like in the play, where the supposedly happy marriages in the end cover up the darkness, this winter wonderland was largely superficial. They didn’t quite have the budget to make it as beautiful as he wanted, but, for the most part, I found it successful, though at times they laid it on a bit too thickly. For instance, the “Twelve Days of Christmas” sung by the drunken Belch and Co. seemed unnecessary, as did the Christmas tree, strung up with lights in the middle of Olivia’s garden. It was too much, and I didn’t find it nearly as illuminating as Branagh evidently thought it was.

Viola is usually viewed as the main character of Twelfth Night, but Francis Barber’s Viola seemed very lifeless to me. She spent the whole play hovering on the verge of tears, and there was little of her vivacity or quick wit. Those two factors, in combination, made her a very one-note Viola, who was satisfactory but not particularly engaging or interesting. It also took the punch out of her tearful reunion with her brother. She’d been tearing up for the last two and a half hours, so seeing her tear up again didn’t really get much of a reaction from the audience. Moreover, it was hard to feel much for her except for just simple, detached pity because there wasn’t much else to her except an unfortunate situation. The only scene where she really shone was the one where she was forced into the “swordfight” with Sir Andrew Aguecheeck. Her terror mounts and mounts until finally she loses control and yells at the top of her lungs as they’re being shoved together. It could have been overdone, and it sounds that way from my description, but Barber made it truly hilarious; my eleven-year-old sister and I both broke down laughing and had to pause the DVD for a minute so we didn’t miss anything.

As if to make up for Barber being a sub-par, though tolerable Viola, the rest of the cast was quite good. All were funny and seemed to capture their characters well, though some were more successful than others.

James Simmons played Aguecheek as one of the most hilariously stupid people to exist. He never really understood any of what was going on around him; his face was perpetually blank and staring as if trying to make sense of it all. Whenever he spoke a temporary look of relief would pass over his face, as though he was thinking “Aah, I think I get it now!” -- only of course, he didn’t. It was truly hilarious. He even looked the part: tall, awkward and gangly, but with a sweet, harmless quality. He wasn’t out to harm anyone, mainly because he wasn’t clever enough to conceive of doing such a thing. He was too busy just trying to comprehend the basics of what was happening around him.

Abigail McKern’s Maria was one of the outstanding performances of the show. She was that irresistible person, full of life and laughter, always with some idea. People followed her because she was a natural leader and so thoroughly likeable. It was impossible not to get sucked into her laughing plans, and I laughed along with her and cheered her on, right up until we saw Malvolio locked up in the cell underneath the stairs. Suddenly, the air was taken out of me. What I had been laughing about the whole time was suddenly no longer funny. And somehow, I felt implicated in it because I were right there with her. Maria is a fairly sadistic character, but by making her so likeable, McKern implicated the audience in her sadism by making us laugh with her right up until they put Malvolio in jail. It was a really amazing performance. James Saxon’s Toby Belch was a good partner for her, if a lot less likeable. They made a formidable team of bullies together.

McKern could be as good a Maria as she wanted, but if she had been doing it opposite a bad Malvolio it would have been worth nothing. Richard Briers’ Malvolio was as deliciously unlikeable as any Malvolio should be, but he maintained Malvolio’s humanity as well. There was always that little voice in the back of your head feeling bad for him (just look at how crazy he is about Olivia!), but it never took over your distaste for him until he was locked up, and suddenly it burst through. The sadistic bullying went too far. Even before then, it was hard not to be uncomfortable with their treatment of him, despite his ridiculous behavior. Haven’t we all fantasized about a perfect life, and yelling at those we think deserve it? Who hasn’t wanted something so much that they twisted facts to make it true? Instead of just being a caricature, he was very much human, at the same time as he was unlikeable enough to make the audience laugh at Maria’s bullying.

If McKern gave Malvolio power by making him not pure caricature, Christopher Ravenscroft did the exact opposite with Orsino. He was entirely hilarious because he was so over the top with everything he did. Even he seemed to be aware of how silly his romanticism was. He was far more in love with the idea of unrequited love than he was with Olivia herself, and he made Viola’s affection for him understandable by his extremely tender treatment of Ceasario. Of course, he achieved this highly hilarious caricature by playing the character as utterly serious in everything he did, and never displaying even a glimmer of humor. Caroline Langrishe was a beautiful and highly dignified Olivia. Funnily enough, I couldn’t shake the feeling that she would have been an excellent match for the humorless Orsino- in her interactions with the Fool she laughed as little as he did, and they were both so charmingly irrational.

Christopher Hollis as Sebastian didn’t much look like Francis Barber, but his performance was quite good, despite the fact that his looks required a fairly high level of suspension of disbelief. He was a thoroughly decent fellow, kind to everyone, especially Antonio. Like every other character, Feste excepted, he’s extremely irrational, totally willing to go ahead and marry a woman who obviously thinks he is somebody else. Despite his short time on screen, I felt like he was very easy to connect with. Perhaps because he wasn’t hovering on the edge of tears for the entire play, I found his reaction to seeing Viola again much more moving than Viola’s response. Tim Barker was a good Antonio for him; they had good chemistry together, and because of the age difference, it came across more as a father-son relationship than a possibly more romantic interest.

Feste has always been one of my favorite Shakespearean characters, but in the only stage production I’ve seen of Twelfth Night he was played as just a senseless comedian, capering around and talking in silly voices the whole time. Anton Lesser did a much better job, making Feste, in my (biased) opinion, the most compelling character in the play. He had a dramatic stage presence in a way that made him feel like the center of every scene he was in, and his strange, bitter wisdom gave the sense of a deep, inward human being whose depths would never be discovered. Though we know little of his story or life, he’s clearly a troubled man. Branagh described him as a lonely, wandering, rather damaged jester, and Lesser certainly played Feste up to Branagh’s description. He seemed very detached from everyone else for several reasons. Firstly, he was almost entirely removed from the bullying of Malvolio, participating in it only in his brief impersonation of the Priest before he helps get Malvolio freed. Even that was clearly against his will, as Maria practically shoved the costume on him without his consent. His delivery of the line “Nay, I am for all waters!” after he takes off his disguise also shows his unwillingness to be a part of Maria’s bullying. That line is normally performed as an eager willingness to do whatever she needs him to, but Lesser, who usually spoke in a dry, drawling tone, suddenly yelled in a bitter outburst at his fury at being forced to participate in their bullying. Though he drinks with them and spends some time with them, Feste is of a fundamentally different make than the shallow tricksters. When interacting with the rest of the cast, there was nobody willing to treat him as more than the silly jester, and only Viola laughed (just once) at his jokes. He was smarter and more cynical than everyone else, and trying to be a jester in a world filled with humorless fools and sadistic bullies.

Lesser also has a beautiful tenor voice, not perhaps the voice of a trained singer, but a hauntingly gorgeous one nonetheless. Fortunately, all of his songs were also beautifully arranged, and all seemed to reflect the loneliness that was central to his personality. Pretty amazingly, his “Come Away Death” ballad was a tune written by Paul McCartney that he allowed them to use for the production. His songs made for some beautiful interludes to the action, and the melancholy arrangement of them called attention to the fact that his songs are almost uniformly not at all funny.

The text here was very lightly cut, which I appreciated. I almost always dislike any cuts that are made, and I wish every play would just be performed full text, in its proper form. The few cuts they made were mostly of asides made by Sir Toby and Co. and mostly during the scenes with the tricking of Malvolio. I didn’t feel that much was lost through them, and the scene would have definitely dragged had they left everything in.

In my opinion, this movie is worth watching for Feste alone, but a lot of the rest of it is great as well. It’s a nice balance of funny and serious, and my eleven-year-old sister enjoyed watching it just as much as I did. Overall, I thought it was a very worthy production, though I don’t think it’s anywhere near a “definitive” Twelfth Night (if such a thing exists) due to a fairly flat Viola and an overdone Christmas theme.

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.

Tony Davenall's King Lear (1974)

So, since I just posted a review of King Lear, I decided following it up with a second would be a good idea, so I could compare the two with the first fresh in mind. I decided to watch a version from 1974, directed by Tony Davenall. I chose this version because it was the other one I happened to have on DVD around my house (never say I’m not methodical!).

This was a made for TV movie, on a very low budget, and it shows through. Had they chosen to stretch their funds less, it could have looked better, but instead they invested in very showy, fancy looking costumes, that, above all else, looked “costumey”. None of it looked like actual clothes worn by real people, but more like Halloween costume dresses and armor. The props also looked incredibly fake, most notably and hilariously, the swords. I can’t even count the number of times a character grabbed a sword by the blade, with seemingly no damage at all to their hands. The artificiality of the swords wasn’t helped by the most terrible swordfight choreography I’ve ever seen. I could spend a paragraph describing just how bewilderingly bad it was, but I think I’ll just say that I laughed out loud straight through Edmund and Edgar’s fight. I don’t generally care about the budget of a production; I almost always feel that with good actors, an empty stage is just as convincing as a lavish set. However, the fakeness of the costumes and props here meant the actors would have to be good enough to compensate for it and make the audience believe in the reality of what was going on.

Unfortunately, they were not up to the task. I was left feeling strangely apathetic about the whole movie. Though there was certainly some power in it (it is still King Lear, after all), I felt vaguely disconnected from everything. Certainly the acting was much patchier than in the 2009 Trevor Nunn Lear, but that alone couldn’t account for my apathy. Even in the scenes where the actors were delivering at their best, something felt off, and it took me a while to figure out what it was. It hit me during 3.2, when Lear and the Fool are out in the storm alone. Patrick Magee puts in some decent raging, and the Fool* puts in some pitiful groveling and yet the scene feels entirely disconnected and strange.

Suddenly, I realized why. The actors each say their lines, and sometimes they say them well, but that’s all they’re doing: saying their lines. When it is not their turn to speak, they are waiting until it is, not listening or reacting, and when they do speak, they are just saying the next block of words set down for them, not really reacting to what has just been said by the other actor. This strange disconnectedness between the characters seems to be nearly universal; they all, even the best of them, do this. They might as well each have been doing solo performances with no knowledge of what the others around them were doing. This basically means that there were essentially no meaningful relationships that came across on screen. There didn’t seem to be any relationships at all, just a lot of people talking at and around each other. In a play so intensely focused on interpersonal relationships, it’s really an unforgiveable flaw.

Many of the most touching moments in King Lear can come off as silly if not done well, something I had not realized the extent of before seeing this movie. Edgar’s fake madness, Lear’s real madness, Gloucester’s “jump”, the interactions between the Fool and Lear, every fight scene and every death can come across as laughable if not done well. Here, the overall effect was silliness. The characters weren’t given enough dignity or reality for us to feel anything for them them, because none of them seemed to really feel anything for each other. It was impossible to empathize with the talking heads, so the scenes that should have been touching were instead, silly. Edgar made faces, jumped around and cackled, but instead of feeling that he was utterly pitiful and dejected, he was just half embarrassing and half amusing. Lear raged and ranted, and yet, I could never escape the feeling that he was just a doddering old fool talking nonsense. Gloucester’s “jump” was laughable, not only because Gloucester was entirely calm and conscious throughout the scene, but also because Edgar stood by watching with a wry, amused look on his face. The Fool lost all his lines that make him an interesting character or a foil to Lear. Perhaps they were trying to have him there as comic relief, or perhaps they just hadn’t thought out what the point of him would be if he didn’t have anything meaningful to say. Either way, the interactions, robbed of their significance, felt deeply pointless. The deaths were also poorly played. Dying is very hard to do on screen convincingly. I’ve seen some deaths done very well, but most of the time, I just don’t buy it. Every death here was pretty ridiculous, especially because they didn’t seem to have enough money to invest in fake blood so that Oswald and Edmund would have wounds to die of. The silliness was perpetuated by the fact that most scenes had a large number of incredibly bored looking guards who stood stock still, not reacting and staring into space no matter what unfolded in front of them. The entire royal court was basically butchered before their eyes and not a single guard even raised his head or changed his expression from one of utter boredom. Think last period of the day math class kind of boredom.

Part of the problem seemed to be that the emotional level was never high enough. If emotions can be ranked from one to ten, ten being the most emotionally charged and one being the least, most of the characters except for Edmund spend most of the time between a six and ten, and Lear himself probably averages around a nine. It’s a play where emotions are almost constantly running high. Now, that doesn’t mean that theatrics are necessary. Understatement can be very effective, provided the emotions are still there, clearly, underneath the surface. Much of this version however, felt totally lifeless. I’ll use the first scene as an example. If you were to play the first scene on mute, (which I did, to test this theory) you would see a normal court scene: the King talks to some people, some people stand up and talk to him, a few come and a few go. Normal, typical day. Again, you’ve got the bored-looking courtiers and guards standing by, but even the main characters didn’t seem to be particularly emotional or surprised about all this. Lear came across as slightly peeved, Kent could have been reading a phonebook for all the outrage he expressed and Cordelia acted like nothing at all had happened.

In fact, Wendy Allnutt, playing Cordelia, showed a remarkable skill at never changing facial expression for the entire play. I noticed her remarkable neutrality in the first scene and looked for it in all her subsequent ones, and indeed, her face never changed, not once. Most of the other characters were not quite so extreme in their non-expression, but in general, scenes packed with emotional charge were played as boring, every day events. In fact, few of the characters seemed to be feeling much at any point in the production. Edgar, upon seeing his father blinded said he was “worse than e’ere I was,” and then acted like he was going for a nice walk through the woods with his Dad on a pleasant day. He actually grinned momentarily when telling Gloucester to jump off the “cliff”, as if this was all a little bit of a joke to him. Gloucester, after having his eyes put out, recited his lines as though he, at most, had a mild stomach ache: he didn’t appear to be in any pain in the slightest. Patrick Magee was entirely expressionless until 3.2 when he raged against the storm, but even then, his rage, on a scale of one to ten, might have hit a six, when it should have hit an eleven. However, it felt like an incredible outburst of emotion since it was the first time we saw any emotions from him in the entire play up to that point. One of the few truly touching moments came when Beth Harris, as Goneril, broke down crying after Edmund was wounded, because even if she was a horrible scheming bitch, it was at least a genuine emotion.

Patrick Mower as Edmund deserves some special mention, because he was far and above the best of them. He was scheming, yet rational, a womanizer, quite clever and not wincingly bad even once. However, his accomplishment loses some of its luster when I think of it in the context of Trevor Nunn’s 2009 King Lear: he would have easily been the weakest member of the cast in that production, by a long shot. Compared to Philip Winchester’s Edmund, he was less everything: less charming, less clever, less wicked and less likeable. However, here, he was a welcome diversion from the rest of the cast, despite not having very much to say due to the editing of the text.

I know I waxed furious at the cuts to the play in my last review, but that was nothing in comparison to this. Edmund’s speeches were mostly gone, as were Edgar’s. Edgar’s aside explaining what he’s doing when he tricks Gloucester about the cliff is gone, so I’m certain that if I didn’t already know what was happening, I would have been entirely confused. Gloucester’s line about living his life out until the natural end is gone as well, so Edgar’s trick doesn’t seem to accomplish much of anything. Most appallingly, Edgar’s final speech about his father’s death was missing. Gloucester’s disappearance was entirely unexplained, and if he did indeed die, Edgar appeared little bothered by it. The Fool’s part was cut to the point that I think he would have been better left out entirely. He had pretty much nothing to say, and most of the lines left for him were ones of little significance. Gone is his line about not wanting to be a fool, his song where he calls the King a fool, and most of the rest of his lines. The battle, and references to it, seemed strangely missing. It took me a minute to realize that the battle had already happened during the scene where Lear and Cordelia are sent off to prison. How they got captured is anybody’s guess. I can’t discuss every line that was missing, but it was almost an hour shorter even than Nunn’s heavily cut version.

The one thing to be said for this is that clear diction is used throughout. If you find yourself struggling to understand the words being said in Shakespeare, perhaps that’s a good thing. However, I think this version was actually far, far harder to understand than the much less clearly spoken Trevor Nunn Lear. Why? When the emotions and the cause of the emotions are made clear, actions make sense. Even if you miss a line or two, the purpose comes through much more clearly. Robbed of the emotions to flesh out the characters, actions and reactions seemed much more arbitrary and strange, even though each word they said was easier to decipher.

Overall, unless you’re trying to see every King Lear ever made, or focused on clear diction above all else, don't bother seeing this. There’s not much here that hasn’t been done better by someone else.

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* The actor playing the Fool does not appear to be credited anywhere.