The Tragedy of Macbeth (dir. Joel Coen, A24 Films)
December 30, 2021
Films of Macbeth have a fraught relationship with space. It’s a play whose own spaces – psychic, architectural, geographic, emotional, supernatural – are particularly fluid, and whose tautness paradoxically combines abstraction with the impression of nuanced interiority. To capture the play’s juxtapositions within the conventions of mainstream screen naturalism isn’t an easy task, and thus …
Macbeth @ The Almeida (live stream)
October 27, 2021
As chamber-piece Macbeths go, perhaps the most iconic remains Trevor Nunn’s RSC production at The Other Place, filmed for television in one of the starkest, barest of all Shakespeare films. The Almeida’s new production, directed by Yaël Farber, aimed at times for a similar effect, with the production’s live broadcast director translating the intimacy of the …
The Tragedy of Macbeth @ Tang Shu-wing Theatre Studio
July 26, 2021
The opening of Tang Shu-Wing’s The Tragedy of Macbeth (recorded in 2019, and made available to World Shakespeare Congress delegates) announces the arrival of a modern couple in a dream world, through which they will navigate the world of Macbeth in the guise of that play’s two protagonists. The dream framing is never given more …
Macbeth: A Conjuring (Shakespeare’s Globe) @ The Sam Wanamaker Playhouse
November 9, 2020
Macbeth: A Conjuring is a welcome anomaly in the era of streamed and socially distanced theatre. For Bonfire Night 2020, as part of its ‘Shakespeare and Fear’ festival, the Globe reunited the cast of its 2018 Macbeth (reviewed on The Bardathon here) to offer a socially distanced, partially staged reading of the play. It’s a great use …
Macbeth (Big Telly) @ Zoom
October 31, 2020
Macbeth’s uncanniness, its waywardness (to take the word that Scott Newstok and Ayanna Thompson’s important book privileges), is central to its blurring of boundaries, its confusion between what is real and what is not. Zoom offers an ideal medium to explore this uncanniness. Big Telly’s production, broadcast in collaboration with Creation Theatre, exploited all the …
Macbeth (Berliner Ensemble) @ BE At Home
May 26, 2020
Michael Thalheimer’s 2018 production of Macbeth, as preserved in the Berliner Ensemble’s stream for its ‘BE At home’ programme during the Covid-19 lockdown, is immersed in corporeality. This is not a production in which bodies are aestheticised, but one in which they excrete, expel, merge and bloat. Macbeth (Sascha Nathan) describes himself as Duncan’s butcher, and that’s …
Macbeth (Playing Shakespeare with Deutsche Bank) @ Shakespeare’s Globe (webstream)
May 12, 2020
At a taut ninety minutes, the Playing Shakespeare production of Macbeth staged at Shakespeare’s Globe in early 2020 – just before the pandemic shut down theatres – converts well into a pacey film that preserves the raw energy of a production performed to thousands of schoolchildren (always a reliably vocal audience, especially at the Globe) …
Macbeth (Queen’s Theatre Hornchurch and Derby Theatre) @ Derby Theatre
March 6, 2020
It can seem like faint praise to focus on a production’s lighting, but Derby Theatre’s new Macbeth was truly extraordinarily well lit. Daniella Beattie’s simple designs created a world of shadow and fear, in combination with Ruari Murchison’s set. For much of the production, a deep stage heavily front-lit created an upstage area that was …
Macbeth @ Manchester Royal Exchange
October 10, 2019
For about half an hour before the Royal Exchange’s Macbeth started, the atrium of the Royal Exchange was rocked by rumbles and explosions, which became increasingly unsettling as the start time drew near. Christopher Haydon’s production – especially in Elena Peña’s sound design – sought to set up a world rent asunder by war long …
Macbeth (National Theatre) @ Nottingham Theatre Royal
January 23, 2019
I didn’t hate the National Theatre’s Macbeth when I saw it last April, but I was underwhelmed. The production has since closed in London, been re-cast, and is now touring the country, opening last night at Nottingham’s Theatre Royal. While the production has an entirely new cast, it remained very close to the London version, …
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