Who goes to big-screen Shakespeare? Not theatre-goers much, and with reason. Apart from the odd corker by Kurosawa, arguably Olivier and Orson Welles — and let’s bung in Zeffirelli for those with a sweeter tooth — the Bard is a better scriptwriter when the words are dumped and the plots he nicked from elsewhere are updated. See 10 Things I Hate About You (the Shrew as high-school comedy), Forbidden Planet (Prospero in outer space) and, best of all, West Side Story (in fair Manhattan where we lay our scene).
There is, as it happens, a semi-respected English-language version of Macbeth by Roman Polanski, who used the cloak of art to get Lady M’s kit off (in his diaries, Kenneth Tynan perved over Francesca Annis’s ‘fesses tristes’). The makers of this new one feel the play’s time has come again and the production notes burble about greed being very this season. The actual film has no such thought in its head nor, come to that, many others either.
The compelling case for another crack at Macbeth is staring us all in the face, surely. The story of Scotland ripped to shreds by factional chiefs and ambitious leaderenes is still breaking news. But that subtext seems to have evaded the attention of Australian director Justin Kurzel, whose calling card is Snowtown (2011), in which a teenage serial killer goes a-dicing in a nastier part of Adelaide. His Macbeth is sort of the same, plus horizontal rain and naturally occurring dry ice. And actors you’d buy a ticket to see.
Aside from its Aussie director, the Scots Nats may also come knocking on the door of the casting director, who has Macbeth played by a German Irishman (Michael Fassbender), Lady Macbeth by a Frenchwoman (Marion Cotillard), Duncan, Banquo and Macduff by Englishmen and Lady Macduff by an Australian Pole.
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