On PBS tonight. I am only 45 minutes into it and am completely blown away. Rupert Goold’s production is stunning and Kate Fleetwood as Lady Macbeth is enthralling.
This may rank up there for me on Shakespeare productions (Branagh’s Hamlet and Hopkins’ Titus are other fav’s…)
Wow. In his comments at the end, Patrick Stewart praises Kate Fleetwood considerably. He said that while he was onstage with her, there were times when she scared him witless. I agree.
Concur. I tuned in because I am a Stewart fan (going back to his I Claudius days), but Kate Fleetwood completely stole the show.
I can’t think of a Lady Macbeth with quite that much power. The nurse/witch trio was really great as well!
I loved it!! A few random thoughts:
*The witches were creepy as hell, as they should be. The nurse’s masks were a nice cover for the beards expressly mentioned in the dialogue. It was fittingly horrifying when – just a few minutes in, after Sergeant Exposition has updated Duncan (and the audience) on the battle, his bravery was expressly recognized, and someone called for a surgeon for him – instead the witches murder him to have his heart for their necromancy.
*Lady Macbeth scrubbing the kitchen walls when Macbeth came home? 
Then again, she seemed to be wearing only panties under the work-coat, and I’m pretty sure we heard Macbeth’s belt fall to the floor as they embraced leaning against the table. I thought they were going to “go at it” right then and there in the kitchen – not inappropriate after coming home from war. 
That, and their frequent hand-holding, really brought home to me that they loved each other and she wasn’t supporting his ambition just because she would be along for the ride.
*Lady Macbeth urged Macbeth (and herself) to be ruthless, but then when he actually resolved to be ruthless, she seemed repulsed by him. Not just by what they had done but by him personally. Example: in the scene where they’re dressing for the banquet. The familiar hand-holding of the earlier scenes took on a dark twist.
*Loved Macbeth in the leather jacket with the shotgun, looking more gangster than hunter. Also loved in the same scene that Banquo and Fleance were not in horse-riding clothes, completely belying Banqo’s “we’re just going for a ride, and we’ll be back in plenty of time for dinner” cover story. Macbeth and everyone else present know he’s lying through his teeth. I half-expected Macbeth to plug him in the back as he walked down the driveway, and I’m sure the idea was that Banquo wasn’t sure Macbeth wasn’t going to do just that, witnesses or not.
*What was up with Woody Allen, the thane of Manhattan? 
(Sorry, can’t remember which thane he actually was.) He was never in uniform and was in a civilian suit even during the battle scenes near the end! IIRC, all the other thanes were in uniform at least part of the time, which makes sense given that a medieval lord was as much a military leader as anything else.
*Loved how modern military camouflage fit with the “moving Birnam wood” thing.
*Poor random soldier getting plugged a la Indiana Jones as he was confronting the hiding Macbeth. The nobleman “merits” a direct sword/knife fight, the commoner just gets one in the chest at a distance.
*Macbeth’s head! I thought Malcolm was going to punt it like a football.
We saw this production when it was at BAM a couple of years ago. I didn’t see the broadcast last night, but I DVRed it and I’ll watch soon. At the time I was calling it the Saw Macbeth because of that creepy, dingy basement/hospital room set and the general horror overtones. I remember loving the way they handled the scene with Banquo’s ghost and the murder of the Macduff children.
That was no random soldier. That was Young Siward, the son of Siward, Earl of Northumberland and general of the English Army.
Oops, sorry. Fog of war and all that. 
Let me revise that then to Scottish noblemen merit a sword/knife fight, foreigners or commoners just get one in the chest at a distance.
I finally got around to watching this over the weekend. If anything I’d say Patrick Stewart was better in the film version than onstage. I don’t think any of the other performances were much different, but they went a little overboard with the stage whispering in some places. That aside it’s a very intense production and using Stalin as an inspiration for Macbeth worked so well.
It’s been 2 1/2 years, but if anyone was wondering what this looked like onstage, here’s how I remember it: everything took place in a single room. It basically looked like the kitchen in the play - it was very large didn’t look very clean, with bare white walls and a few tiles. It suggested a hospital room but also any other room where something bad had happened or was going to happen. That’s a big part of the reason I was saying I thought of this as a horror movie influenced production. There was something very creepy about this basement-sh setting. There was faucet upstage left for Lady Macbeth’s famous scene. Downstage, and just to the right, was a large industrial elevator like the one we see a few times in the movie. It was used for many entrances, but I don’t think it was used for all of them. The Macbeths used it plenty of times of course. There were a lot of video projections on the walls. Mostly it was grainy footage of soldiers marching, tanks plowing over the landscape, and things like that. Similar footage was used in the movie. Just after Banquo was murdered, the cast sang or chanted that same ominous Russian song that appears in the film. The staging of the scene with Banquo’s ghost was one of my favorite things in the show. The scene played normally, and at his cue, Banquo took the elevator down to the stage, walked straight to the dinner table, stood on the table, and marched downstage to Macbeth’s place, standing directly over him. Immediately the play cut to intermission. After the intermission, the scene started again at the beginning, but Banquo didn’t appear. But since we know what Macbeth saw him do, there was kind of an afterimage effect. Macbeth imagines Banquo for the rest of the scene, and we know what he saw even though he’s not there. They did the same thing in the film by changing the lighting and things, but it wasn’t as striking as seeing Banquo march right down the table like that.
The best thing in the play was just seeing Patrick Stewart make that sandwich. We talked about this a lot after we saw the show but I’d forgotten about it. It transported that scene from necessary exposition to an act of astounding callousness on Macbeth’s part. (It’s also funny how you observe degrees of cruelty when he’s already ordering the murder of his friend … but watching him arrange that murder with so little difficulty that it doesn’t stop him from making his lunch? That’s cold.) The scene was a little different onstage, I think, in that he took several large bites out of the sandwich in front of the murderers - taunting them - before he gave them a piece. But it was still a very clever representation of the way he draws these two men into his clutches. Another thing I don’t remember from the stage version is that sing-songy way he delivers the line “Fleance, his son…” also completely casual. You could see one of the murderers roll his eyes to say ‘Oh no - you want us to kill his small child too?’ That was great.
I think this production did a great job of showing Macbeth being brought down by his own uncontrollable imagination. I mentioned this at the time, but Patrick Stewart usually plays commanding guys who are on an even keel emotionally, so watching him fall apart in this production was disturbing. I still loved his version of the “Is this a dagger I see before me?” and a lot of other touches - he really bought the line “Full of scorpions is my mind, dear wife!” to life.
Recasting that scene between Lennox and the unnamed other lord (usually Ross) - which is normally pure exposition and not very interesting - as a short scene where Lennox is torturing Ross for information was brilliant. They did it that way onstage, too.
They also brought out one hilarious moment. There was a scene where Lady Macbeth was laying into her husband yet again, challenging his masculinity, and she asks him some rhetorical question. And Patrick Stewart just gives throws up his hands and does this “Take my wife, please!” shrug. Cracked me the hell up. It was a little hint that Lady Macbeth must’ve been pretty tough to live with even before she pushed him into murdering a bunch of people. 
At some point in every production of Macbeth there has to be a moment where Macbeth starts to take control because Lady Macbeth doesn’t see the need to kill anymore, or is cracking under the strain of killing Duncan. (There’s a legend among actors that there is that Lady Macbeth has a “lost scene” that explains her sudden decline. It sounds more like an excuse for lesser actresses.) It’s difficult because a lot of the time, Macbeth is played as an almost meek guy who gets nagged into murder by his wife. If that happens it’s hard to understand why he becomes the mastermind later in the play and becomes so hard and cynical. And I thought this production came close to having a Macbeth that was too wimpy, but when it came time to handle the transition, they got it right and from there he was great. I’d have to watch it again to see exactly where this moment was, but I think it was when he was about to have Banquo killed and told her to “be innocent of the knowledge” until it was done.
If anybody hasn’t seen the Ian MacKellen Macbeth, I urge you to get it from Netflix as soon as you can. (I don’t know if that link will work, but it’s the 1979 version.) It’s a filmed performance of the stage play, not a film adaptation like this. But he’s just incredible, and so is Judi Dench as Lady Macbeth. He makes a tough Macbeth and he’s not shy about wanting to become king when he finds out it could happen for him. I still think they handled that transition moment the best because they did it much earlier in the play: after the other lords discover Duncan has been murdered, they’re discussing his guards, who the Macbeths have framed. And almost out of nowhere, Macbeth says “I do repent me of my fury that I did kill them.” Lady Macbeth breaks up the scene by fainting. In most productions, she’s faking it to deflect suspicion. In the MacKellen version, she’s not faking. You can see right away that she is really stunned that her husband, who was very conflicted about killing Duncan and spent all of last night wracked with guilt about the murder, just spontaneously murdered two more people when it wasn’t part of their plan and probably wasn’t necessary. From there, he’s in charge.
Thank you so much for that, Marley! I really appreciated you taking the time to expand upon the stage play and your insight on the production.
It’s possible. The text that we have of Macbeth is the shortest of all of Shakespeare’s plays, and there’s been scholars who have suggested that it’s a cut version, not the original version.
Just as an aside, I recently saw the production (TV movie) of Hamlet, with David Tennant as Hamlet and Patrick Stewart as both Claudius and The Ghost. Stewart was incredible in that as well - he actually almost made me feel sympathy for Claudius.
Concur. Although I really didn’t care for Tennant. He just seemed too overly wimpy to me to have enough nastiness in his disdain for Ophelia. Stewart dominated that production but I couldn’t help but compare to Branagh’s.
It’s not his very shortest play (The Comedy of Errors is the shortest and I see The Tempest also has fewer lines than Macbeth), but you’re basically right. I do think the missing scene is just a legend that explains the difficulty of playing the character, though. We know some songs by Thomas Middleton were put into the play, and since Middleton wrote that stuff while Shakespeare was still alive, I’m guessing the play was altered during the early or middle 17th century. I know King James had a thing for witches, so it was probably a popular topic. It’s suspected that other stuff was cut or that maybe the version of the play that survives was not based on a complete script. If that’s true, who knows what we lost, but the apparent cuts do give Macbeth a noirish quality I’ve always really liked. In Macbeth everything goes to hell very, very fast. It makes the play more intense than even Hamlet or Othello.