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Macbeth (1978) The set is sparse, dark, and perpetually fog-filled. A Caravaggio-inspired lighting scheme picks out the actors’ faces from the deep shadow around them. Shakespeare’s words, in this context, take on a visionary vividness. As with Kevin Kline’s filmed stage production of Hamlet, the words in Trevor Nunn’s Macbeth are emphasized and given life by some of the finest actors around. This is essentially a filmed version of the legendary stage production put on by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1976. Despite the absence of many requisite “cinematic” elements, this is by far the most satisfying adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth (not including Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood) that I’ve seen. Considering the success of the Kevin Kline Hamlet and now this, I’m beginning to think a bare-bones approach is the way to do it. With actors the caliber of Ian McKellen and Judi Dench, lavish sets and props would be an afterthought, even a distraction. Instead, they control the screen with their fierce, combustible passion. Through his actors, Nunn preys on the audience’s imagination. Instead of spoon-feeding us a steady, predictable diet of horror show gore and carnage, Nunn emphasizes the imagistic poetry of Shakespeare’s language. The language, channeled through such superior interpreters as McKellen and Dench, takes on an expressionistic life of its own. “Full of scorpions is my mind,” Macbeth confesses to his wife. The horror is internal, not external, and Shakespeare’s words have a terrifying immediacy that only the imagination can do justice. I felt a chill down my spine as Macbeth says, “Light thickens, and the crow makes wing to the rooky wood. Good things of day begin to droop and drowse, whilst night’s black agents to their prey do rouse.” The barren set, then, is a mindscape, a blank canvas on which the audience paints its own fears. McKellen brings a forceful vitality to a difficult role. This is a warrior, after all, and McKellen walks a razor’s edge with his performance. This warrior is tightly strung. His watery eyes bulge and face contorts with each newfangled creation of his “heat-oppressed brain.” Macbeth is doomed to be “bound up in saucy fears” by his own overwrought imagination. Guilt for him is a visionary construct, an “air drawn dagger” and the bleeding ghost of his former friend, Banquo. McKellen gives a dynamic performance, full of movement and nervous mannerisms. When Macbeth is consumed by a paralyzing nihilism in the fifth act, the sudden stillness of McKellen’s body language is striking. He delivers the “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” soliloquy with a scary sense of calm resignation. Earlier in the play, he hung on his wife as if increase of appetite had grown by what it fed on. The camera hovers within inches of their faces, and the effect is discomforting, voyeuristic. Judi Dench is hardly the best-looking Lady Macbeth I’ve seen, but she carries herself with such commanding swagger that it’s not hard to imagine why Macbeth is so smitten. Yet for all Lady Macbeth’s ball-breaking, Dench understands that eventually her character goes insane with guilt. When she says in the beginning, “Come you spirits, that tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,” the words are spoken as a true, and truly dark, incantation. So dark, in fact, it rattles even Lady Macbeth’s steely nerves. She breaks off her words and retreats, seemingly shaken. Gathering her strength she crouches down once more and finishes what she started. It’s a bravura delivery, matched later by her performance of the famous sleepwalking scene. This is where many actors falter, because the transition from cold-hearted bitch to guilt-stricken lunatic can be jarring. Dench handles the transition seamlessly. She lets out a primal scream during this scene that is so emotionally naked I could hardly watch. And yet I couldn’t take my eyes off her. That pretty much describes the impact of this production. It’s ironic that of all Macbeth versions this is the least explicit, least violent, but is the most difficult to watch. I felt drained by the end. McKellen and Dench give such powerhouse performances the effect is of watching the complete mental disintegration of two people happen before your eyes. Impenetrable shadows surround the characters, literally and figuratively. Nunn strips the play of all extraneous trappings and what is left are the words. When the author is Shakespeare, that’s not a bad way to go about it. **** stars click here to watch video clips from |
