Word: shakespeareanly
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MORE THAN Hamlet and more than Lear, Macbeth and the movies are made for each other. Of the great Shakespearean tragedies it is the darkest, the bloodiest, the most physical and most unearthly. Macbeth has everything--slaughter, madness, treachery, revenge, ghosts and witches, and at one time or another, Griffith, Welles and Kurosawa have each taken a turn at its adaption. It is an invitation to extravagance...
...flamboyance is forgivable. In one scene in particular--Macbeth's second meeting with the witches--the visual overstatement undoubtedly enhances the text. Polanski fills a dank, green-smoked cavern with a bevy of the oldest, ugliest, cacklingest witches imaginable, and the grotesquerie, the outlandishness, is just in line with Shakespearean exuberance...
...cold-blooded, hardly monstrous. In an early central scene, her persuasion of Macbeth to the regicide--the sexual taunts of the Shakespeare are replaced with tears. The two are here more Romeo and Juliet than Macbeth and his Lady, and FrancescaAnnis more a product of the Hefnerian, than the Shakespearean, imagination...
...know, there is no technical term for the fear some directors have of opening scenes, but Jonathan Miller has the most noteworthy case of it around today. The English physician turned thespian has once again axed the opening scene of a Shakespearean production, plunging right into the middle of the action without preface. This year's Oxford-Cambridge Shakespeare Company offering, Julius Caesar, like last year's Hamlet, is a stripped-down version, with several scenes, excessive staging, and lavish costuming all done away with...
...long as Brook remains faithful to the Shakespearean source, his dramatic choices are justifiable, but in his desire to render the play more coherent, he makes some changes that are unforgivable. Edmund is deprived of the rhetorical flourish with which Shakespeare endowed him, and the brilliant soliloquy of the first act ("This is the excellent foppery of the world...") is shortened and presented as part of a dialogue between Edmund and his brother. Jack McGowran's Fool is more than competent but too clearly the sage unrecognized. And, incomprehensibly, Brook leaves out two of the best lines in the play...