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BBC's Macbeth (1983) Nicol Williamson’s voice curiously combines the sound of a rumbling train and a hissing snake. I mention this because it’s borderline distracting, and only adds to the suspicion that Williamson has been beamed in from another planet. John Osborne claimed he was the greatest actor since Marlon Brando, and both thespians unquestionably share an exclusionary eccentricity. Williamson doesn’t seem comfortable in his elongated body; his hangdog face stays mostly immobile as his eyes dart about feverishly, and his breath comes in start-stop bursts. No one could accuse Williamson of cribbing his delivery from any other Macbeth that I know of: his voice seems to shift octaves at random. Yet Williamson’s performance is effective because Macbeth is one of Shakespeare’s most insular characters, a powerful warrior who nonetheless tends to be top-heavy, dwelling anxiously on the painted pictures of his “heat-oppressed brain.” In other words, the part doesn’t suffer from being infused with a quirky, off-kilter quality. Compared to Williamson, Jane Lapotaire is a somewhat more conventional Lady Macbeth, but it’s not a problem. She certainly looks the part: sharp cheekbones, high-arching eyebrows, and raven-black hair. She’s shrewd, sexy, and two-faced. For these usually tame BBC productions, I was surprised by the overt sexuality of her reading of the famous “Come, you spirits, that tend on mortal thoughts” soliloquy, a reading punctuated by the heavy breathing and satisfied smile commonly associated with the tail-end of an orgasm. Is that what she calls being “unsexed”? Unexpected, but it works. Certainly got my attention, at least. The more productions of Macbeth I see, the more I’m convinced that the play is not only about the ill-effects of ruthless ambition, but also the crumbling of a once-passionate marriage. This subtext came across most strongly in the recent Sean Pertwee Macbeth (a very good version that I highly recommend), and is present here as well. As Macbeth’s power grows, and his guilt concomitantly, he resents the role his wife played in egging him on to the blood-soaked throne. Rejected, she goes insane and Macbeth becomes the fiend-like monster his wife once seemed to be. This is a solid, if not inspired production of an incredibly dark play. The acting’s not as good as in Trevor Nunn’s version and the visuals can’t hold a candle to Welles’ fever dream vision of 1948. Its main strengths are the two lead performances and the fact that the text survives on screen virtually uncut. However, you’d be doing yourself a disservice if you didn’t check out Trevor Nunn’s late 70’s Macbeth starring Ian Mckellen and Judi Dench. That’s the darkest and most emotionally draining interpretation of the play I’ve seen. It’s a must-see, while this is more of a curiosity piece. |
