Macbeth On Screen

Film and TV adaptations of Shakespeare's 'Scottish Play'


Thought to date from 1606 (just before Antony and Cleopatra) and presumed to have been written for a court performance before the Scottish-born King James I (who would have been well aware of the historical background), Macbeth is Shakespeare's shortest tragedy and one of the most immediately recognisable even to those who have never read or seen theplay. Compared with Hamlet or King Lear, it's a model of narrative economy, though it fully matches them for psychological complexity and surpasses anything else in Shakespeare (or any other writer) for the depth of its insight into the nature of evil. Many of its scenes have taken on an iconic life of their own: the three witches on the moor, the appearance of Banquo's ghost at the feast, Lady Macbeth's sleepwalk and the march of Birnam Wood towards Macbeth's castle at Dunsinane.

Given its longstanding popularity, throat-grabbing immediacy and relative brevity (even an uncut text should only run two and a half hours in performance), Macbeth is one of the most frequently filmed of all Shakespeare plays. The first British film was made in 1911 by the Co-operative Cinematograph Company. It no longer survives, but it seems likely that it ran along very similar lines to the same company's Richard III (also 1911), presenting a truncated version of the play sourced from Sir Frank Benson's stage production, with the original text appearing as intertitles.

Two Shakespeare anthology films featured scenes from Macbeth. Famous Scenes From Shakespeare (1945), directed by Henry Cass, showcased Duncan's murder and the sleepwalking scene, and starred Wilfrid Lawson (Macbeth), Cathleen Nesbitt (Lady Macbeth), Felix Aylmer (Doctor) and Catherine Lacey (Gentlewoman). The World's A Stage (1953, d. Charles Deane) drew on the Young Vic Theatre Players to perform similar excerpts.

The first feature-length British adaptation came in 1954 with Joe Macbeth, which is discussed later. The first 'straight' feature-length British version was made in 1960 by George Schaefer, and was originally intended for American television's Hallmark Television Playhouse, though it also got a limited theatrical release. Maurice Evans and Judith Anderson played the Macbeths, with Michael Hordern as Banquo and Ian Bannen as Macduff. The colour cinematography (by the great Freddie Young, who would shoot David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia two years later) tended to prettify the material, partly shot on location in Scotland, though it was well received at the time and won numerous Emmy awards for both the production and the lead actors.

In 1971, Macbeth was given the big-screen Panavision treatment in Roman Polanski's lavish production. This had been the subject of some controversy: eyebrows were raised over the funding being supplied by Playboy magazine, while there was much speculation about the links between events in the play (notably the murder of Macduff's family) and the real-life slaughter of Polanski's pregnant wife just two years earlier. But this tended to distract attention from the film's many qualities: co-scripted by Polanski and theatre critic Kenneth Tynan, it was a ruthlessly focused, highly intelligent interpretation, with an unconventional approach to casting (Jon Finch and Francesca Annis as unusually young Macbeths). Graphically but never gratuitously violent, and with a memorable score by early music specialists the Third Ear Band, it remains the finest British cinema Macbeth to date.

The most recent, made in 1997 by Jeremy Freeston and starring Jason Connery and Helen Baxendale, was filmed on location in Scotland and occasionally shows flashes of genuine inspiration (in the dagger scene, a church cross casts a misleading shadow), but for the most part it fails to rise above the merely competent, and the obviously tiny budget (like the 1960 production, it was primarily intended for television) is a major drawback.

Television adaptations of the play run into double figures, and date almost from the dawn of the medium. On 25 March and 3 December 1937, the BBC broadcast selected scenes from the play (the second broadcast was sourced from an Old Vic production), while the first complete broadcast came on 20 February 1949 in a version staged by TV Shakespeare veteran George More O'Ferrall that starred Stephen Murray and Bernadette O'Farrell as the Macbeths, Esmond Knight as Banquo and Patrick MacNee as Malcolm. All were unrecorded live performances, and have consequently not survived.

The next three television productions (in 1960, 1965 and 1966) were all made for schools and broadcast during the day, usually in serial form. The first colour television broadcast of the full play came on 20 September 1970, in the BBC's high-profile Play of the Month slot. A conservative but often effective production, it starred Eric Porter and Janet Suzman as the Macbeths, with John Thaw as Banquo and John Woodvine as Macduff, and briskly directed by John Gorrie. Two months later, ITV broadcast its own colour version, a five-part serial aimed at schools that starred Michael Jayston and Barbara Leigh-Hunt.

The next television Macbeth was broadcast nearly a decade later, on 4 January 1979. Sourced from a 1976 Royal Shakespeare Company production by Trevor Nunn that had already passed into theatrical legend, the television version was equally acclaimed, and is widely regarded to this day as one of the most wholly successful of all television Shakespeares. The original production was stripped down to its barest essentials, with a small cast playing in the round with virtually no scenery and minimal props (instead, brilliant use was made of sound: the clinking of Macbeth's daggers as his hands shake in fear, his wife's unearthly scream during her sleepwalk), and television director Philip Casson also made extensive use of extreme close-ups, with Macbeth (Ian McKellen) and Lady Macbeth (Judi Dench) emerging from the shadows to deliver close to career-best performances.

The McKellen/Dench Macbeth was broadcast on ITV halfway through the first series of the BBC Television Shakespeare cycle. Perhaps wisely, its own Macbeth did not appear for some time (it was eventually shown on 17 October 1983), and took a very different approach, staging the play in a semi-stylised pre-medieval Scotland. Nicol Williamson was an unusually tortured Macbeth, with Jane Lapotaire a Lady as much in thrall to her own physical desire for her husband as to her personal ambition. Like Nunn and Casson before him, director Jack Gold made no attempt at visualising Macbeth's various hallucinations (Banquo's seat remains resolutely vacant during the ghost scene), suggesting that much of his torment was a product of his own imagination, an interpretation amplified by Williamson's feverish performance. An accompanying Shakespeare in Perspective documentary was broadcast some time after the screening, and presented by the crime writer Julian Symons.

The BBC's next complete version of the play was its most imaginative to date, its title Macbeth on the Estate (tx. 5/4/1997) conveying documentary director Penny Woolcock's ambition: she staged the play on Birmingham's Ladywood estate, the characters turned into drug dealers, street gangs and criminals - even the witches became a trio of sinister children. Though the main roles were played by professionals (James Frain and Susan Vidler as the Macbeths, Andrew Tiernan as Banquo, Ray Winstone as Duncan), a large supporting cast was drawn from the area. The result garnered a mixed reception: although Woolcock's approach worked surprisingly well in many aspects (Tiernan and Winstone were particularly effective), the text was heavily cut to just 80 minutes, and the poetry suffered as a result.

New Year's Day 2001 saw Channel 4 broadcasting the second RSC-sourced television Macbeth, this time drawn from Gregory Doran's acclaimed late-1990s production with Antony Sher and Harriet Walter as the Macbeths, supported by Joseph O'Conor (Duncan), Nigel Cooke (Macduff) and Ken Bones (Banquo).

All the above-mentioned productions remained more or less true to Shakespeare's original text, cuts notwithstanding. By contrast, Joe Macbeth (d. Ken Hughes, 1954) and the Macbeth in the BBC's ShakespeaRe-Told season (BBC, tx. 14/11/2005) used the play merely as inspiration for modern-dialogue scripts and contemporary settings. The first, as the title implies, restages the play as a New York gangster film, with Joe and Lily Macbeth (Paul Douglas and Ruth Roman) killing Duncan 'The Duke' (Grégoire Aslan) to inherit his turf. The presence of Sid James as 'Banky' (i.e. Banquo) suggests a comedy, and there are plenty of unintentional laughs, though director Hughes plays it completely straight. Despite a promising concept, it fails to catch fire in practice, and most of the entertainment ultimately comes from spotting the lifts from the original.

The ShakespeaRe-Told version, scripted by Peter Moffat, has a very promising first half and a genuinely original premise: the play is set in the high-pressure world of celebrity restaurants, with Macbeth (James McAvoy) the fiercely ambitious protégé of TV chef and restaurateur Duncan Docherty (Vincent Regan), while the 'witches' become three philosophical dustmen. Despite some effective blood-drenched dream sequences, Moffat's script ultimately fails to live up to its promise: the second prophecy, revolving around the phrase "pigs will fly", turns out to herald a feeble pun rather an expansion of an early scene in which Macbeth demonstrates the most efficient way of carving a pig's head.

There have been numerous documentaries about the play, with most high-profile stage and television productions at least being mentioned in an arts magazine programme (for instance, BBC2's Review ran an item on a Zulu version of the play in 1972). More intriguingly, Tony Robinson presented The Real Macbeth (Channel 4, 2001), an attempt to dig out the truth behind Shakespeare's multiple layers of legend. There have also been several broadcasts of Giuseppe Verdi's first Shakespeare-sourced opera Macbeth, two of them involving British productions.

Summary

Films
1911, d. F.R.Benson
Famous Scenes from Shakespeare, 1945, d. Henry Cass
The World's A Stage, 1953, d. Charles Deane
Joe Macbeth, 1954, d. Ken Hughes
1960, d. George Schaefer
1971, d. Roman Polanski
1997, d. Jeremy Freeston

Television
BBC, tx. 25/3/1937 (selected scenes)
BBC, tx. 3/12/1937 (scenes from Old Vic production)
BBC, tx. 20/2/1949, d. George More O'Ferrall
BBC, tx. 31/1/1958 (for schools)
ITV, tx. 3/1960 (for schools)
BBC, tx. 5/4/1965 (for schools)
BBC, tx. 11/10-8/11/1966 (4 pts, schools adaptation by Michael Simpson)
Play of the Month, BBC2, tx. 20/9/1970, d. John Gorrie
ITV tx. 4/11 - 2/12/1970 (5 pts, schools adaptation)
ITV tx 4/1/1979 (RSC production by Trevor Nunn), d. Philip Casson
BBC Television Shakespeare, BBC2, tx. 17/10/1983, d. Jack Gold
Shakespeare Shorts, BBC2, tx. 17/5/1996
Performance: Macbeth on the Estate, BBC2, tx. 5/4/1997, d. Penny Woolcock
Middle English, tx. 15/1 - 12/2/1998 (5 pts), d. Michael Bogdanov
Channel 4, tx. 1/1/2001 (RSC production by Gregory Doran)
ShakespeaRe-Told, BBC1, tx. 14/11/2005 (modern-dialogue update by Peter Moffat)

Animation
Shakespeare: The Animated Tales, BBC2, tx. 23/11/1992, d. Nikolai Serebriakov

Documentaries
Review, BBC2, tx. 7/4/72, excerpts from Zulu version
Shakespeare in Perspective, BBC2, tx. 5/11/1983 , p. Julian Symons
The Real Macbeth, Channel 4, tx. 1/1/2001, p. Tony Robinson

Opera
Verdi's Macbeth, BBC2, tx. 27/12/1972
Macbeth, BBC2, tx. 1977

Theatre of dreams
Cherry blossom, Kabuki, sake and shrines. All useful diversions for an actor playing drama's most jinxed role. Antony Sher takes Macbeth to Tokyo

Sat 29 Apr 2000 17.53 BST
First published on Sat 29 Apr 2000 17.53 BST

'Will the jet-lag be bad?" "We'll find out tomorrow." "It is tomorrow." "And tomorrow and tomorrow."

I'm talking to Harriet Walter on the plane to Japan. We're playing the Macbeths in the current RSC production - directed by Greg Doran (who's also my partner) - and it's doing a three-week run at Tokyo's Globe Theatre.

The jet-lag is severe, and Tokyo's no help. A city in a permanent state of rush-hour. A constant sense of crowd, of commuting, of gridlock. Traffic moves so slowly that televisions are installed on car dashboards. Cyclists have taken to the pavements, whizzing expertly through the thronging pedestrians. In the subway, the trains are frequent, fast and full. Day and night. Everyone seems exhausted. Complete strangers - suited gentlemen and bespectacled housewives - doze on one another's shoulders. Young women are slumped over, forehead to knee. Men strap-hang, asleep on their feet.

But if at first Tokyo seems like a cross between Metropolis and Blade Runner, there's another side to it, just evident in the avenues of trees: the branches still have a wintry grey look, but people say the cherry blossom might come out while we're here, and then we'll be truly blessed.

Macbeth itself needs no help, luckily - "sold out" signs are already up at The Globe. This is a rather unlovely pink concrete building in Shin-Obuko - a lively district crammed with noodle bars and mini-supermarkets - but it houses a very dynamic auditorium, not unlike the Swan in Stratford.

Tech-ing the show with the Globe staff, via interpreters, we encounter the astonishing politeness and good-humour that Westerners always note in the Japanese: people really do bow to you all the time, beaming with warmth. Two days later, we open. The atmosphere in the auditorium is electric, the audience concentrated in a way that I've seldom known before. Cynics might say it's the language barrier - simultaneous translation is available through earphones - but I suspect it's also something about Macbeth as a play.

Why did Kurosawa's film Throne of Blood serve it so well, I ask a Japanese group after the show, or Ninagawa's more recent stage version? The fall of the man of honour, someone suggests, he's a familiar figure in samurai legend. A fascination with violence - says someone else - it's the other side of the coin, the restraint and respect you visitors always admire in our personality. And it's about a strong wife, the real power behind the throne, chuckles a third; and we know this character, too.

On the first weekend, Greg and I visit Hiroshima. Arriving late Sunday night, gazing from our high-rise hotel, there's a familiar neon landscape below, but the next morning, in fresh soft sunlight, the city reveals itself to have a lovely aspect, built across the Otagawa River Delta, with woody hills in between. The buildings are all modern, of course, post 1945, post blast.

Hiroshima. The name bangs in our brains, but to the locals it's just home. This is quite hard to absorb as we drive to the Memorial Peace Park, with the taxi's radio playing the Village People hit In The Navy, in Japanese.

In the museum you see scorched pocket-watches stopped at 8.15am, and models of Hiroshima before and after that point in time - a whole city here one moment, gone the next - and a full-scale replica of the bomb itself, nicknamed Little Boy. Further in, the sights are even grimmer. The skin of a dead child's finger - peeled away like a prawn shell - kept by the mother to show the father when he returned from the war.

Elsewhere, I found myself wishing that the elegantly-lit exhibits of melted roof tiles and glass, like all the shots of mushroom clouds, weren't so bloody beautiful. No such problem in the cinema, where it's impossible to keep watching the screen. The face of one boy has bare-bone jaws, like a skull, yet he's alive. Many of the doctors tending the injured, and the cameramen recording their efforts, would later succumb to radiation sickness; they didn't yet know the danger.

Needing fresh air, we go outside. Greg breaks down. I sit numbly trying to make notes.

At the other end of the park, one building is preserved from 1945: the Industrial Promotional Hall. Like many of the things we've seen today, it has a skinned look, the brickwork showing pink and fleshy through the grey plaster. Little Boy exploded directly above this spot, right here.

We return to Tokyo in a kind of daze. Doing the show is rather dream-like tonight. Theatre seems a little irrelevant. On the other hand, being Shakespeare, some passages sound strangely apt. "Pity, like a naked new-born babe striding the blast." And I have no difficulty picturing Banquo's ghost tonight: his face has bare-bone jaws.

Mid-week we do a day-trip to Mount Takao, taking a chair-lift up the steep slopes of towering pines. After the fumes of Tokyo's eternal rush-hour, the mountain air is intoxicating, and the views vast. They'll be even more beautiful in a few days' time. Every bud on every tree is at bursting point. It's like they're awaiting some cue.

At the summit, there's a macaque monkey reserve, where you can enter the enclosure. The residents are untidily-furred, stump-tailed and red-faced, with a blushing, shifty look as they dart behind the visitors like pick-pockets. In a flash, one has got Greg's Time Out Guide to Tokyo. For a moment, the animal scans the pages at speed, as if searching for its review, and then, as I've been known to do with Time Out, attacks it with gnashing teeth. After a brief tug-of-war, an attendant returns the book to us, minus two bite-sized chunks. Fortunately, the directions are still intact to Ukai Toríyama, a renowned restaurant in the neighbouring valley.

This is a seriously traditional Japanese eating place - we're the only tourists here today - where separate dining chambers, complete with sliding doors and paper walls, are set among a mossy garden of ponds, water-mills and lacquered bridges. Kimono-clad waitresses bear course after course to your room. Much of the food is excellent, though I must confess a problem with substances that bob or slip. Japanese beer is very good, though, and on the return to Tokyo I join the ranks of slumped commuters.

For our second weekend, we board the bullet train, a sleek silver serpent with pointed head on either end, and zip across country to the ancient capital, Kyoto. It's a city of temples and shrines, yet not as serene as this sounds. No sooner have you seen one of the shrines at Kiyomizu-dera - a cluster of temples built on spectacular verandas overhanging the valley - than you find a dozen shops selling its likeness in plastic, cardboard or cake.

We proceed to Kyoto's most famous landmark, Kinkaku-ji, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion. This is also the title of Mishima's acclaimed novel, based on a real-life crime here in 1950. A Zen Buddhist student, tortured by physical ugliness and a stammer, became obsessed with the beauty of the 500-year-old, gold-plated temple, poised above its own exquisite reflection in the Mirror Pond, and burned it down. The present building is an exact reconstruction. Fabulous black and gold carp rise from the shallows of the pond, mouths agape, begging from the tourists as shamelessly as the Swans of Avon.

Sanjusangen-do Temple is my favourite: a huge, dark hall holding 1,001 gilded statues of Kannon, the deity of mercy. The thousand are life-sized, ranked like an army, and the one is a seated, multi-limbed giant. Mercy might be the theme, but there's also something fantastically brutal here. Gods of thunder and wind snarl at you - wooden figures with crystal eyes, their look both furious and tearful - wrestlers grimace, musicians thrum their drumskins. I reel back into the sunlight.

We strike lucky again at Nijo Castle, a magnificent shogun palace. Colossal wooden gates and mossy stone walls outside, shadowy corridors within, the rooms decorated with beautifully simple murals of pine and blossom.

Most fascinating are the "nightingale floors" whose boards warble as you walk. These weren't built for the magic they put into the atmosphere - it's just a 17th-century security device.

During our last week in Tokyo, we attend a matinee performance at the Kabuki Theatre in Ginza. I'm expecting this to be a chore, done in the line of duty, but it's mesmeric. Here is theatre preserved in aspic from 400 years ago, Shakespeare's time. Yet, whereas western classical theatre eschews the art of copying (I don't seek to play Richard III like Olivier, or Macbeth like McKellen), Kabuki cherishes it. Gesture by gesture has been handed down by generations of actors. Especially compelling is the behaviour of the onnagata , the female impersonators. In the one-act play, Shunkan, the fisher-girl is played by Fukusuke with a simpering falsetto, quivery butterfly gestures and a strange sideways totter, which causes her to fall over in any crisis.

The performances are all stylised, presented rather than inhabited. In contrast, kneeling to the side of the exceptionally wide stage, the narrator, a sturdy, square-headed man, now growling, now wailing, bears a more passionate, almost enraged relationship to the story. The audience calls out excitedly as a new figure appears on the hanamichi - a ramp through the auditorium - wearing a long-sleeved pink kimono and mask-like white make-up. This is the superstar onnagata , Tamasaburo, who played a notable Lady Macbeth in his youth. Unlike Fukusuke's fragile, fluttery portrait of womankind, Tamasaburo's is altogether more stately and glacial; he slowly performs the elongated steps and held poses of the Cherry Blossom Dance.

Outside, the real thing has suddenly bloomed in a spell of warm weather. A whitish pink, or geisha pink, the blossom transforms Tokyo's garish cityscape. On overcast days, the canopies of flowers create their own curious radiance, immensely soft. When there's sunshine, they leap to the eye with an altogether sharper, crystalline clarity. This is deceptive. Touch an individual blossom and its petals instantly break away, taking to the breeze. The spring air is alight with swirls of pinkish snow, the streets lined with it, too. One storm could decimate this spectacle. It's why it's so prized, why the cherry blossom became the symbol of samurai warriors: you fall at the height of your perfection - no withering, no "sere and yellow leaf", as Macbeth puts it.

So now it's Hanami, cherry blossom time. You expect westerners to be amazed by it, but what's more surprising, and wonderful, is how the locals walk about with their heads back, grinning as though they'd never seen the like before, and lift infants up to the branches.

In Ueno Park, the avenues throng with people. Each tree is staked out with a blue tarpaulin underneath, and a lone figure in a sleeping-bag. These are junior office workers, guarding the spot till the others can join. After our last show on Saturday night, and after fulsome and moving farewells at the Globe, Greg and I hurry back to the park.

Drink is an essential part of Hanami and the place is crazy with it now. Arriving sober, the impression is of boarding a ship that seems steady under your feet while tossing everyone else about. The park lanterns have been switched off to encourage the crowds to leave, but the semi-darkness is still clamorous with hoarse laughter and song, sexual moans, and the occasional smashing glass. Mountains of litter are stacked everywhere, and teams of paramedics are charging around with wheeled stretchers.

We've brought along a little bottle of sake and a sushi lunch-tray, but this party ain't for us. We turn and flee.

To understand the Japanese, someone told us, you have to think of them more as a tribe than the citizens of a country; they are, after all, 97% racially intact, which can't be true of many modern societies. Hanami is a good illustration. It's not a street party, not a question of people over-indulging; it's a festival of Nature. The cherry blossom comes suddenly and is over in a few days. While here, it's to be worshipped - intensely, wildly, without inhibition.

Back in the safety of our 14th-floor hotel room, we laugh at our own cowardice, our alien-ness here, then open our sake and toast the extraordinary rite of spring going on in Tokyo city tonight.

Antony Sher is appearing in the title role of the Royal Shakespeare Company's production of Macbeth at the Young Vic until June 3.