bardolatry

There’s a very thoughtful commentary on Macbeth by Harry V. Jaffa over at the Claremont Institute. The essay investigates the declining morality of Western civilization vis-a-vis three of its literature’s most memorable anti-heroes: Macbeth, Raskolnikov of Dostovesky’s Crime and Punishment, and Camus’ Stranger, Merseault.

The message—I am tempted to call it the moral—of Macbeth, is the inexorability of the moral order. Macbeth’s soliloquy in act 1 tells us with perfect clarity why the murder must fail. The action that follows bears out the truth of that soliloquy. Not only does the plot fail, but neither Macbeth nor Lady Macbeth is allowed one moment of enjoyment of the fruit of their crime. Their punishment begins almost immediately with the murder. The crime is therefore in every sense self-defeating. The moral order, accordingly, is more powerful than the evil spirits that Lady Macbeth called upon. The moral order, according to The Stranger or Crime and Punishment, lacks any such power. Both of these works record the declining power of morality in Western civilization, and in this sense they record the decline of the West. Yet Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address reaffirms the same power of morality as Macbeth. Perhaps that is why Lincoln said that “nothing equals Macbeth.”

Read the whole essay here.

With the Oregon Shakespeare Festival season just getting underway, early reviews are starting to trickle in. We’ll post on that ourselves in a couple of weeks, but until then here’s what we’ve seen so far in other rags:

Reviews of Mark Rucker’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream:

• Marty Hughley, The Oregonian, Portland
• Ron Cowan, Statesman Journal, Salem
• Bill Varble, Mail Tribune, Medford

And here are some articles on the OSF 2008 season and new artistic director, Bill Rauch

• “Opening Night”, Michele Mihalovich, Ashland Daily Tidings
• David Templeton, “Going for the Gamble” in the Bohemian, North Bay
• Misha Berson, “A New Vision for the Kaleidoscopic OSF” in the Seattle Times
• Seattle Gay News Bits & Bytes
• “OSF prepares to open 2008 season”, Napa Valley Register

Person David Templeto

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Tags: Midsummer, OSF

Branagh and McGregor appeared on the British interview show “Parkinson.” Branagh is talking about “Sleuth” and McGregor discusses his performance as Iago in a stage production of Othello.

Directed by Geoffrey Wright

Starring Sam Worthington and Victoria Hill

Bloody, Bold Macbeth

I like filmmakers who get their hands dirty wrestling with the Bard, who don’t take the text as something sacrosanct but rather as something to be lived, breathed, and dramatized. I have a soft-spot for Baz Luhrmann’s hyperactive, R + J, for example, and Peter Brook’s postmodern but intensely vivid Hamlet. Polanski’s Macbeth, though deeply flawed, is a work of fierce, unforgettable artistry.

The most recent film adaptation of Shakespeare’s midnight-dark Macbeth plays fast-and-loose with the source material, but has much to recommend it. It can boast of some fine Aussie acting, inventive camerawork, and clever conceits aplenty. But the dish feels both overbaked and underbaked at the same time. Every shot looks Photoshopped, drugged-out, hallucinogenic—as if the cinematographer had “eaten of the insane root that takes the reason prisoner.” Too often it’s filmed like a music video, forgetting that Shakespeare’s music is in the words.

In adapting Shakespeare’s famous tale of an ambitious warrior who kills his king to gain the crown, director Geoffrey Wright doesn’t modulate the intensity. He ratchets up the sex and the violence until the noise blows out the speakers. He virtually eradicates his source material. The sex and the violence is fine—it’s all in the play (okay, maybe not the naked witches scampering about Macbeth like coked-up groupies), but the play also has passages of lyric power, philosophical profundity, and psychological insight. Look elsewhere for those qualities; they don’t appear in this production.

Considering Wright helped launch the career of Russell Crowe some sixteen years ago by casting him as a brutish skinhead in Romper Stomper, I had high hopes for his choice of actor to play Macbeth. Sam Worthington is no Russell Crowe. He plays Macbeth as a petulant rock star, not so much inhabiting the character as modeling a series of increasingly ugly, faux front-man fashions. Shades and ugly shirts do not a Shakespeare character make. I can’t tell if Worthington’s performance is muddled because he has no text to work with, or if he has no text to work with because his acting chops weren’t up to the challenge. It could very well be that a more rounded performance lies discarded on the cutting room floor.

Victoria Hill as Lady Macbeth has no such excuse—she co-wrote the adaptation. The abbreviated scenes do her no favors. She’s a fairly soft-spoken, brittle Lady Macbeth, not exactly the force-of-nature suffused with diabolical aid Shakespeare wrote. A new take on the role can be interesting, but rarely effective: witness Francesca Annis’ weepy, simpering Lady M in Polanski’s version for the ocular proof. Hill deliberately tones down the sexual fire that is supposed to light up her husband. Judi Dench and Jeannette Nolan were both homely-looking women who, through sheer confidence and some powerhouse acting, were convincing as femme fatales who had their husbands wrapped around their little fingers. Here, Macbeth has more sexual chemistry with the Witches than with his wife.

The main problem is that Wright and Hill haven’t given the actors enough room to develop characters in-the-round. They’ve chiseled the play away. The result is like Michelangelo’s Moses reduced to just the prophet’s burning eyes—powerful enough, to be sure, but devoid of any context. The script isn’t Shakespeare it’s Shakespeare soundbites; the Bard as a Cliff’s Notes comic book.

If the play were any other but Macbeth I might follow the filmmakers’ reasoning (let’s recall, for example, that Baz Luhrmann aimed his attention deficit Romeo and Juliet at the teenage market). But the original play of Macbeth is a brutal, dagger-sharp examination of ambition, guilt, and power. It’s chock-full of graphic violence, overt sexuality, and supernatural horror. It’s Shakespeare’s shortest, most nightmarish work. Yet still Wright and Hill have disemboweled it, digging out the guts of their source material—the language, the characters, the psychology—and leaving only the skin and bones.

The short-shrift is disappointing because Wright and Hill have some great ideas. (Every production of a Shakespeare play adds some tiles to the Bard’s grand mosaic.) They clearly know the score sheet backwards-and-forwards to be able to riff on it so cleverly, as they often do. Updating a 400-year old play, which itself was set in medieval Scotland, requires a good deal of inventiveness.

Therein are Wright and Hill blessed: their cup runneth over with cleverness. Macbeth the Scottish warlord becomes Macbeth the Melbourne druglord, more Scarface than William Wallace. England, Scotland’s enemy in the play, becomes a ruthless team of Drug Enforcement Agents. When “Birnam Wood comes to Dunsinane,” it’s a logging truck barreling through the front gates of Macbeth’s mansion. The name of the logging company? What else but “Birnnam Wood”?

The biggest bur in the cap of the purists will be Wright’s reading of the Three Witches. Here they are tarted-up in Catholic schoolgirl outfits like stray extras from the set of Britney Spears’ “Hit Me Baby (One More Time)” music video. In a shocking opening sequence, Wright has his witches desecrating the shrines and statuaries in a graveyard—it’s a brutal, memorable opening salvo, and I wish Wright had gone further with the idea of the Witches as evil spirits conspiring to damn Macbeth. Hardly the withered “hags” of the play, three nubile young things play the Weird Sisters as oversexed members of a demonic coven. The interpretation makes a certain sense, especially since Wright has them appealing to Macbeth’s masculine vanity. (Let’s just say the witches’ final prophecy is delivered at a ‘climactic’ moment.)

Wright and Hill pull at least one Ace from up their sleeve. An enduring question of the play is ‘Why does Lady M. go mad?’ The first clue is in the aforementioned opening scene, which finds Macbeth and his Lady at a graveyard, the burial place of their “Beloved Son.” (Historical records indicate that the real Lady Macbeth may have once been a mother.) When later Macbeth orders the slaughter of Macduff’s wife and child, Lady M. sees the subsequent horror on the evening news, and the idea that her husband is heartless enough to order the murder of a child puts her over the edge. Though not in the play, the moment offers the audience a psychologically convincing explanation for Lady M’s ensuing madness, and I credit Wright and Hill for an original take on the age-old question.

But overarching cleverness and a few dashes of originality don’t ultimately equal compelling drama. Visual pop and pizzazz is understandable if it’s meant to distract from a weak story and stilted dialogue (I just saw the brain-frying 300 last week), but why adapt a Shakespeare play if you’re going to treat him like a hired scribe on a dumb action flick? Macbeth endures because of the words, not in spite of them. Wright treats the play as a thin coat rack on which to hang eye-catching clothes and accessories.

Of the many, many lines cut from the play, the most telling edit comes at the very end. Consider the words Wright and Hill chose to leave out of Macbeth’s famous “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” speech:

’Tis a tale told by an idiot

Full of sound and fury

Signifying nothing.

Must have hit a little too close to home.

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