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Brush up your Shakespeare…

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My question to Da Massive is this: what are the most successful Shakespeare adaptations, be they film or television?

For myself I have a soft spot for Branagh’s Much Ado About Nothing, Welles’s Macbeth and the recent BBC Hollow Crown series (Richard II, Hernry IV & V).

But what about Chimes at Midnight? Olivier’s Henry V or Branagh’s? McKellen’s WW1 version of Richard III?

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Comments

  1. Roman Polanski’s Macbeth is a great, grim adaptation that really captures the supernatural aspect well from the earliest shots. It also features a naked Keith Chegwin sleeping in a haystack.

  2. I think it’s Branagh all the way. Much Ado and Henry V are flawless – I can’t see any argument for Olivier’s HV being superior – it’s so stylised and stagey that for me it doesn’t let the language do the talking, and it cuts bits that I love. Branagh did an incredible job with it – so moving, so powerful, so funny.

    I love Henry V – strangely enough I was just reading it yesterday, apropos of not much. It gives me the shivers – the bit when Hal lets Scroop, Grey and Cambridge dig their own graves without even knowing it; the slow transformation of Pistol and Bardolph from harmless comic idiots to genuinely scummy looters and cowards; the fabulous meeting of Hal and Kate after the battle; the best Chorus he ever wrote. The histories tend to get overlooked when people list their favourite Shakespeare, but HV is mine.

    “Oh for a muse of fire” – just those words are enough to set me off. It was largely the Branagh, at the age of maybe 13, that hooked me. I love it to pieces.

  3. Polanski’s Macbeth is very powerful and probably marked the first time I awoke to the power of Shakespeare when I saw it in my mid teens.

    Kurosawa also used Shakespeare as the origin of two of his greatest films Ran (King Lear) and especially Throne Of Blood (Macbeth).

    Finally, I have to say I found Baz Luhrman’s take on Romeo & Juliet thrilling and entertaining as was of, course West Side Story based on the same story although not using the language.

  5. I seem to remember the Beeb bringing Shakespeare adaptations to television in the late 70s/early 80s? Can’t pretend I saw them all, but the one with Michael Hordern as Lear sticks in the memory.

  6. Serious answer:

    Olivier’s Henry V for the music and the Eisenstein stylings, tho’ I agree Ken does the part better. His Rich III has a slightly Carry On quality these days but it’s got to be watched.

    Chimes at Midnight. Orson Welles as Falstaff – what da hell dya want?

    Roger that on Macbeth by Polanski. Welles’s version is well worth watching for the expressionist lighting and the weird accents.

    Peter Brook’s Lear – the grimmest film ever made, as it ought to be. The play is about the end of the world. Filmed in Denmark, and very much in thrall to The Seventh Seal. Except it makes Bergman look like Jacques Tati.

    A lot of the BBC adaptation from the 70s-early 80s are top notch in terms of the performances, if not the rather precious staging. Amazing casts. John Cleese as Benedick! Come on!!

    The Hollow Crown? Rich II was great – Ben Wishaw is up there with Jacobi and Michael Pennington. But I couldn’t hear a f***ing word Simon Russell Beale said as Falstaff. It was just…. annoying.

    • Yes that Peter Brook Lear was bleak as fuck. One of the sisters (Goneril?) putting an end to herself by whirling her head around and striking it against a jagged rock.

      Incidentally, Goneril is possibly the single worst girl’s name of all time, isn’t it? Don’t get too many Gonerils knocking about the place do you?

  7. The Patrick Stewart Macbeth is pretty good too. Although the idiot playing the porter/Seyton/various wants locking up for crimes against ham.

    Saying that, during one soliloquy PatStew actually does a wolf awooooo on the word “howls”. I don’t understand thesps: presumably he thought it was great and then the director went along with it, rather that saying, “Don’t do that, Pat, mate. You sound fucking stupid.”

  9. I’ve got about 15 versions of Hamlet on DVD. My favourite is the Michael Almereyda one (Ethan Hawke as Hamlet, Bill Murray as Polonius) set in modern day New York. It shows both interpretations of the ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy (a contemplation of suicide and a call to action). However my favourite actual portrayel of Hamlet is Mel Gibson’s in the Franco Zeffirelli version. A total contrast to Branagh’s ice cold and calculating Prince, Gibson is all manic energy a lĂ  Lethal Weapon.
    Of other Shakey films, the best:
    1. Baz Luhmann’s Romeo + Juliet
    and
    Richard Loncraine’s Richard III (Ian McKellen screaming “A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse” as his jeep won’t start.
    2. Kenneth Branagh’s Much Ado About Nothing (spoilt only by Keanu Reeves wooden Don John) and Henry V.
    3. Al Pacino’s Looking For Richard.

    The worst:
    1. Kenneth Branagh’s Love’s Labour’s Lost (as a musical. ffs!).
    2. Lawrence olivier’s Hamlet (Olivier “greatest actor ever” my arse! Total ham.)

    Here’s a video what I made, look you now:

    • I love the Almereyda Hamlet – Elsinore as a corporation, Polonius hiding in a hotel room cupboard, and the play within the play being a video. Great fun.

      Not an adaptation, but Branagh’s In The Bleak Midwinter is a great feelgood film – a bunch of down-on-their-luck actors doing Hamlet in an abandoned church at Christmas. Richard Briers as Claudius and John Sessions as Gertrude are a hoot, and Michael Maloney’s What is The Fucking Point soliloquy is as good a modern take on TBONTB as you can get.

    • Thanks Gary. I enjoyed that. You’re clearly a man with many strings to your bow.

      I can imagine that a teacher doing Shakespeare could get an enormous amount of mileage out of it too. Fascinating to see so many approaches to the speech.

  10. The best I’ve ever seen was the RSC’s “Macbeth” in 1979 directed by Trevor Nunn, with Ian McKellan as Macbeth and Judi Dench as Lady Macbeth. Dark, minimalist, very stark – concentrating on the language. They certainly had the the right actors for it.

    I was lucky enough to see the production at the Young Vic, and it was later filmed by the BBC.

        • Afraid I totally disagree with you there, Mose. I love the setting and period being played with in order to explore the plays, but leave me the original dialogue, please. That’s where the beauty lies.

          • Yeah, the whole point of Shakespeare is the language, otherwise you might as well just adapt Holinshed or Boccaccio and cut out the middle-man. The plots aren’t his genius (or, indeed, his).

            • Completely agree about the language being central. But if you are translating any other medium to the screen you have to turn it into something cinematic, not just a lot of people talking all the time.

              So inevitably quite a bit of the text has to be lost.

              Ages since I saw it, but another vote for Jarman’s Tempest.

              • Of course, but mosley was saying that Shakespeare is best turned into Forbidden Planet/10 Things I Hate About You re-imaginings, in which none of his language survives. Gary and I were disagreeing with that, we weren’t saying that we were against text cuts in straightforward films of the plays.

            • This is the reason I have always hated Baz Luhmann’s Romeo and Juliet.

              I’m sure it’s a very good film, but it’s a sucky Rome and Juliet. Filleting that beautiful language and substituting clever design and gunplay is not, to my mind, a very good trade at all.

              • But it doesn’t! It’s faithful to the original text. Ok, chopping some and changing order here and there (which is pretty necessary for the cinema – I think the only film version of a Shakey to not do that was Branagh’s 4-hour Hamlet) but it doesn’t change or add anything new to the original text. And it marries it to modern images. Fantastic film!

                • The film chops loads of stuff about and removes whole characters, mainly as a result of the changed setting. To give but one example, Paris dies in the original work, but not the movie.

                  If memory serves, there isn’t a lot of extra dialogue added, but he takes the original text and edits the living hell out of it. Because that’s what one of the greatest works in the history of the English language needs: Baz Luhrmann editing it.

                  • But that’s what every fillum of a Shakey play ever has always done, since the beginning of recorded time and beyond. Edited the text. Can’t be avoided. And I don’t mind that. As young DisappointedBob says above, the story is not that important, it’s the language what matters. As long as the principal speeches and soliloquies and dialogues are there it matters not a jot if a “thou art” or a “Paris” is missing here and there.
                    I could be wrong, but I don’t think Baz adds any extra text at all. (Whereas the only film I can think of that actually used the whole unedited text, the aforementioned Hamlet by Branagh, actually adds some flashback scenes what Shakey never writ).

                    • Agree to disagree.

                      My view is probably coloured by the fact that I think he’s a terrible film-maker and one of the last people on earth who should be taking the scissors to Shakespeare. I don’t think the play benefits from chopping and changing so that the central characters get to hold guns sideways.

                      Good soundtrack though.

                  • FWIW, I agree. I don’t like the Luhrmann at all – not because I don’t like modern treatements (I do) but because it’s completely unmoving. He guts the sheer emotional wallop of it, the way the opportunities to survive pass the lovers by.

                    I remember an interview in Select with Thom Yorke once, describing the writing of Exit Music (For A Film) and he articulated exactly how I feel about the play. He said something like, “I never understood why, after they shagged, they didn’t just run away. They must’ve known it couldn’t end well, so why didn’t they just run away?”

                    That whole thing of reading or watching something that has a terribly sad ending for the millionth time and desperately hoping it will somehow magically end better, while knowing – of course – that it won’t. That’s the feeling I get from Romeo & Juliet when it’s done properly, and that’s what I didn’t get from the Luhrmann.

                    (And don’t get me started on the whole zooming into the guns to see the word “Sword” engraved as a brand name on them.)

                  • Never seen either.

                    I gather the Zeferelli plays it fairly straight, so I can see why it would be seen as more faithful. The problem with BL’s R&J is that it’s first and foremost a Baz Luhrmann joint. The source material is no more consequential than the songs in Moulin Rouge, or the floating onscreen text in the Great Gatsby – they’re all just wallpaper to him, that horrible philistine (*sobs*).

                    The sad thing is that both Danes and DiCaprio can really act, or at least they certainly could at that stage in their careers. If they’d had a director a little more willing to chill the fuck out it could have been a great movie, but instead their performances are just swallowed by the “me, me, me” direction.

                    • You said “agree to disagree” and now you’re going on a bit! Unfair! There was me, all compromised and everything, on the sofa, and then there was you all firing a last bullet n’ting! Well!
                      So I’m gonna fire back with: R+J is a sheer delight to behold, introduced the Tarantino kids to the joy of Shakey, Di Cap was amazing in the role (and looked the right age), the scene where he kills Tybalt is, like, wow, Queen Mab becoming an ecstasy tablet is a stroke of genius, and, and, and…

                      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvliK8XqogQ

  13. Agree on Polanski’s Macbeth, and especially McK’s RIII which we watched again recently. I’ve never seen the Branagh HV as I have never forgiven him for “Peter’s Friends”, without doubt the worst film ever made, though after Bob’s review I shall give it a look.

    • Henry V’s prologue features the speech where Shakey wishes he had “a kingdom for a stage” and asks forgiveness for “this unworthy scaffold”
      asking “Can this cockpit hold the vasty fields of France? Or may we cram within this wooden O the very casques that did affright the air at Agincourt?” Of course cinema provides Shakey with the worthy scaffold he dreamt of. Henry V deserves the cinema, and Branagh exploits it brilliantly. The battle scenes are all mud and blood; some of the best on screen til Saving Private Ryan came along.

  14. ‘O’ with Josh Harnett wasn’t a bad riff on Othello. And Oliver Parker’s Othello is pretty good (with Branagh as Iago). But there’s never been a really great film Version, imo.

  15. My favourite is Jarman’s Tempest – it’s rough around the edges and v. free adaptation but stands on it’s own really well. Warning: I think contains Christopher Biggins not fully dressed.

  18. No ones mentioned Prospero’s Books – the Peter Greenaway retelling of The Tempest. Haven’t watched it for many many years, but I seem to remember enjoying it.

  19. I thought David Tennant’s Hamlet was pretty good; it was on the beeb a few years’ ago.

    I generally feel that something gets lost in the move from stage to screen. I’ve seen Shakespeare performed in all sorts of places, from pubs to The Globe, but something dies slightly when it’s stuck on a screen. In a similar fashion, Oscar Wilde’s plays always seem claustrophobic on TV and film, whereas they have a wonderful lightness of touch in the theatre.

    In Shakespeare’s birthplace in Stratford-upon-Avon, they have actors walking around who do random bits of Shakespeare, and it’s lovely to see the crowds interacting with it: something magical happens.

  22. Of fairly straightforward versions, I’d add the Anthony Sher/ Harriet Walter Macbeth, as done on Channel 4. The Mark Rylance/Stephen Fry all-male Twelfth Night is a good filmed performance from The Globe.

    The Derek Jarman version of The Tempest is a gloomy, strange and erraticly acted (Toyah! Ken Campbell!! Heathcoate Williams? ) but personally, I’ll defend it as an interesting , 70s counter-cultural approach.

    Somewhat missing in action is the Julie Taymor film of Titus Andronicus with Anthony Hopkins, but I thought it was a valid version of a difficult play.

  23. Another vote for Peter Brook’s King Lear – unremittingly bleak, as it should be, but magnificently awful. And the bleakness dramatised in a poetry that is just…..beautiful.

  24. ‘Ran’ is a great Japanese version of King Lear, which in turn is Shakespeare’s greatest play. The Hollow Crown is a sumptuously made compendium of the underrated History Cycle which arguably represent the crux of his work.
    Fans of filmed stage versions should be pleased to know that the RSC is committed to filming the entire canon over the next few years. At least three of which will feature a Hillbilly of Muswellian origin in roles of varying sizes.

    • Consider me impressed, MHB.
      I carried off a passable rude mechanical at drama college but have nothing but awe & respect for those with real pedigree.
      Have to agree about Lear being *the* masterwork & about Kurosawa’s treatments.
      As an aside, I have a vivid memory of watching Throne Of Blood at the Bradford National Film Centre in the 80s ( the only Imax screen in the UK at the time IIRC) with the 16 mil print projected onto the monstrous screen looking like a postage stamp. Superlative movie, nonetheless.

    • Hi Mus!
      When you said “At least three of which will feature a Hillbilly of Muswellian origin in roles of varying sizes”, I first read it to mean that Ray Davies would be in the RSC’s televised Shakespeare productions! A bit later I realised that you were referring to your good self. That sounds incredibly cool – I’m well impressed.

      But also – just think if Ray Davies were to be in a Shakespeare production – what could he play?
      I reckon he might be quite good as the Porter in Macbeth: “Much drink may be said to be an equivocator with lechery -it makes him, and it mars him.”

  25. I am indeed currently employed by the RSC; the realisation of a proper childhood ambition. Watching Richard III in the Swan Theatre in the early 90s is why I went into this ludicrous, but wonderful profession.

    I think Ray would make a very fine Richard III himself, actually. Or a decent Leontes; riven, as he is, with seething jealousy.

    • Absolutely outstanding film, and Vinnie’s finest hour. A ripe Shakespearean ham cuts off Arthur Lowe’s head and force-feeds Robert Morley his own poodles , ably assisted by a cross-dressing Diana Rigg. What could be better, beeatch?

      “….and make two pasties of his shameful head!”

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