Rupert Goold's Film of Macbeth

Rupert Goold's Film Of Macbeth

We've just finished watching Rupert Goold's TV film of Macbeth on PBS's Great Performances, an updated staging of the play, our hands-down favorite of Shakespeare's, with Sir Patrick Stewart in the title role that sets the action in the mid-20th century in what's supposed to be some "nameless militaristic society". The text's repeated references to Scotland, however, undermine the conceit.

The staging was reasonably OK, as were the performances, but was not without several directorial missteps along the way one of the most egregious of which has Macbeth deliver his crushing, "Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow", the most devastating soliloquy in all of Shakespeare, in the company of his dead queen who's been wheeled in on a hospital gurney by three nurses, her body covered by a sheet.

A weird trio, those three nurses. We've actually seen them before in this staging. Twice before, as a matter of fact. But the film was made by a Brit in Britain, and in Britain, nurses are not called nurses. In Britain, they're called sisters, which of course makes the three weird nurses three weird sisters.

For that sly pun alone we almost forgave Mr. Goold his pointless updating of this masterpiece.

We've just finished watching Rupert Goold's TV film of Macbeth on PBS's Great Performances, an updated staging of the play, our hands-down favorite of Shakespeare's, with Sir Patrick Stewart in the title role that sets the action in the mid-20th century in what's supposed to be some "nameless militaristic society". The text's repeated references to Scotland, however, undermine the conceit.

The staging was reasonably OK, as were the performances, but was not without several directorial missteps along the way one of the most egregious of which has Macbeth deliver his crushing, "Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow", the most devastating soliloquy in all of Shakespeare, in the company of his dead queen who's been wheeled in on a hospital gurney by three nurses, her body covered by a sheet.

A weird trio, those three nurses. We've actually seen them before in this staging. Twice before, as a matter of fact. But the film was made by a Brit in Britain, and in Britain, nurses are not called nurses. In Britain, they're called sisters, which of course makes the three weird nurses three weird sisters.

For that sly pun alone we almost forgave Mr. Goold his pointless updating of this masterpiece.We've just finished watching Rupert Goold's TV film of Macbeth on PBS's Great Performances, an updated staging of the play, our hands-down favorite of Shakespeare's, with Sir Patrick Stewart in the title role that sets the action in the mid-20th century in what's supposed to