You do unbend your noble strength, to think/ So brainsickly of things.
November 29, 2015 5:45 PM   Subscribe

 
I disagree entirely that MacBeth disappoints onstage (and in fact as I understand it the "curse" is more related to the technical/combat demands of the show increasing likelihood of mishap, and the tendency for flagging theatre groups to put it on because they know it's popular and hope it will put asses back in seats.) Still, I think this excellently outlines why it tends to translate to screen better than most Shakespeare works.
posted by Navelgazer at 5:57 PM on November 29, 2015 [2 favorites]


the tendency for flagging theatre groups to put it on because they know it's popular and hope it will put asses back in seats

I've seen something recently that the 'curse' originated from a reviewer tired of seeing the play (can't find it after a moment's google.) Either way, it is rather the opposite of cursed on stage (although actors spinning around and screwing up their equilibrium seems like a self-fulfilling prophecy.)
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 6:14 PM on November 29, 2015


But the real question -- which theaters are included in the "limited" release in a few days?! I can't find info anywhere.
posted by auggy at 6:14 PM on November 29, 2015 [1 favorite]


As my Shakespeare professor said, why the hell did Polanski SHOW the dagger Macbeth saw in front of him? He thought it was a very immature interpretation of the play. I don't remember if Lady Macbeth actually had blood on her hands.
posted by njohnson23 at 7:02 PM on November 29, 2015 [2 favorites]


Well, it is extremely difficult to stage effectively.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 7:15 PM on November 29, 2015 [9 favorites]


So I recently saw the Polanski version, but I had the Polish(?) dubs on instead of English. What was cool about that was the fact that it wasn't until Duncan and company meet up with the soldier who tells of Macbeth's good fortune that I was sure whether I had the wrong soundtrack. It made perfect sense for the witches' bit (at least the first bit) to be in a foreign tongue. In fact, the witches' initial dialog is so overdone and – let's be honest – kind of hokey, that it was MUCH more effective to hear it where the only word I understood was "Macbeth." So that would have been cool if Polanski would have done that on purpose.

But yeah, showing the dagger (and the stupid little sound effect every time it showed up) was really really stupid in a mostly effective version of the play.
posted by nushustu at 7:17 PM on November 29, 2015 [5 favorites]


I'm a theatre practitioner, not a critic, but I have yet to see Macbeth done well on stage. (Unless we're counting Sleep No More -- which while it wasn't everything I had hoped it would be, felt worth the ticket price.) I have seen it done poorly, meh-ly, and so absolutely bizarrely that I have no idea what was in the brain of the director.

It's never been my favorite Shakespeare, but after about a dozen times of seeing it and never enjoying it, I'm not one of those people who will run out to buy tickets to the next production. Give me Much Ado, Twelfth Night, Lear, Richard III... or a bunch of other plays instead.

Then again, I've seen a LOT of terrible Shakespeare (and done some of it too!). I'm not sure that Macbeth is any harder to do on stage than any other Shakespeare play -- it just seems more popular.
posted by JustKeepSwimming at 7:55 PM on November 29, 2015 [2 favorites]


Well there's a great staging of Macbeth on Broadway right now; it just has another title. You see, Hamilton is Macbeth, because ambition is his folly. Madison is Banquo, Jefferson’s Macduff, and Birnam Wood is Congress on its way to Dunsinane...

Ok, I'll go back to the Hamilton thread now.

On another note, I did once see a high school student from some kind of school for troubled youth get told that he would be suspended if he didn't go back in after intermission to a particularly bad student production of Macbeth. He left.
posted by zachlipton at 8:58 PM on November 29, 2015 [9 favorites]


Paywalled.
posted by Coaticass at 9:59 PM on November 29, 2015


Macbeth is one of Shakespeare's shortest plays and you can make it shorter easily and with no guilt by cutting the scene he likely didn't write. I think the challenge most directors face with it is the same one they face when they direct Dream - the lure of the supernatural is so great that they forget that there are characters with personalities making choices.

Strip away the witches (but don't when you direct it) and you have a main character who wants to secure the monarchy for his progeny and his ambitious wife who is willing to "unsex herself" and wish infertility on herself so he can be king now. He's overwhelmed with guilt for the regicide. He becomes obsessed with protecting his new position, especially when he fears his children well not sit on the throne.

But then his wife dies and suddenly it's all for naught. He sees what he's become in one if the most remarkable recognition/reversal moments in theatre. He sees what he's become and, for a little while, becomes himself again - just long enough to die with valor.

It can be a profoundly powerful play on stage. You just have to get over the witches. They're minor characters.
posted by Joey Michaels at 2:54 AM on November 30, 2015 [6 favorites]


Now I am on a fruitless IMDB/youtube quest to find the (so, so terrible) version I saw during high school, where the guy who played Macbeth looked like Hulk Hogan. (I can recognize it by the Act 5 Scene 5 monologue.)
posted by jeather at 5:01 AM on November 30, 2015


We did Macbeth as part of our GCE English syllabus, which means I can't really see it in the same way as any other Shakespeare. And I'm of the opinion, and hardly alone, that you can't really appreciate Shakespeare until you've lived a bit - or a lot. It grows with you through the slings and arrows. Too early, and it's more an inoculation than an infection. (I remember the Jennings and Darbishire story about them doing Macbeth. "Enter Lady Macbeth with a taper. What's a taper?" "I don't know. Perhaps it means tapper." "What is she going to tap?" etc).

That said, I love Macbeth (unlike the other two texts we did, Royal Hunt Of The Sun, which I barely remember, and Catcher In The Rye, which I loath now as strongly as I did then). Contains violence and sexual imagery: well, schoolboys. We read through the play and saw a London production, but the words have stuck far more strongly than the staging. I think it benefits well, perhaps better than most others, by knowing enough to see the play beneath the play - and how it would have seemed to contemporary audiences. Not that other Shakespeare doesn't benefit from a bit of scholarship, but Macbeth yields easily and gratifyingly, at least initially. And the words!

I think the article in the FPP is right, in that cinema is just better at managing to make the different threads in Macbeth, which have very different dynamics, cohere. There are more tools in the box; some songs sound better live, some better with a good producer and a good studio able to work up a piece through effects and overdubs and technology.

Which makes one wonder how Shakespeare would have coped in Hollywood. Someone MUST have done this...
posted by Devonian at 5:25 AM on November 30, 2015 [1 favorite]


If quality writing on Shakespeare adaptations is your thing, there's a first rate review essay on the new Kurzel/Cotillard/Fassbender Macbeth (discussed in the main article) by Peter Kirwan over at the Bardathon.
posted by Sonny Jim at 6:18 AM on November 30, 2015


MetaFilter: You just have to get over the witches
posted by GenjiandProust at 6:19 AM on November 30, 2015 [2 favorites]


I like The Argumentative Old Git's take on it:
And one of the challenges Shakespeare was drawn to, I think, was to depict a tragic protagonist who is self-aware from the very beginning, who knows exactly what he is doing and where his actions will lead him. And such a protagonist, I think, is Macbeth. Here, I depart somewhat from Welles’ theory: Macbeth is no fool. At times, indeed, I think he is the most intelligent character Shakespeare ever created.

For, uniquely amongst Shakespeare’s tragic protagonists, Macbeth knows precisely what he is doing. He knows precisely what the significance is of his actions, and what they will cost him. And the peculiar terror that play invokes comes from his inability, even with this knowledge, to do otherwise. In the first two acts of the play, both he and his wife present two different and contradictory fronts: she is the one determined to commit the murder, but incapable of doing the deed herself; he, on the other hand, is the one who knows the true significance of what he is about to do, and shirks at it, but is, nonetheless, able to do the deed.
posted by languagehat at 8:41 AM on November 30, 2015 [4 favorites]


Macbeth is an extraordinarily difficult play to stage effectively!
posted by lysimache at 2:14 PM on November 30, 2015


why the hell did Polanski SHOW the dagger Macbeth saw in front of him?

Polanski's film of Macbeth is my personal favourite of any cinematic interpretation of Shakespeare's work. I liked it because it's very immediate and realistic. As for the dagger, he made a choice to show it literally from that point of view, and Polanski goes on to switch around questionable perspectives throughout the film. I liked how he interpreted the mirrored prophecy sequence. I'll have to watch it again soon.
posted by ovvl at 2:42 PM on November 30, 2015


One thing (don't know if it's come up) is that Shakespeare's company had a deal where this play was written knowing it would be performed in some private chamber for the king. It was never written for the "big" stage.

McKellen/Dench did one in some super small annexy second stage that apparently worked.
posted by Trochanter at 1:52 AM on December 1, 2015 [1 favorite]


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