Tragedy or travesty? Sam Worthington and Victoria Hill in Macbeth. Photograph: PR
The leather kilt was the last straw in Geoffrey Wright's Melbourne underworld take on Macbeth. Not that I'm averse to a few kilts in the Scottish play. But I knew something was amiss as the thane's thighs flashed and I pondered, "Is that a Jean-Paul Gaultier?" You should never leave a Shakespeare production worrying about the leading man's wardrobe.
Was my concern/distraction/despair a knee-jerk reaction against modern adaptations of the bard's plays? No. There should be no sacred cows in the theatre and Shakespeare should not be set in aspic. But if you are going to adapt Shakespeare then you had better have some balls about it (though perhaps not so many as the Washington Shakespeare Company's all-nude version of Macbeth currently doing the rounds). I would far rather a gutsy fringe performance that puts itself on the line (think of Sulayman Al-Bassams' Al-Hamlet Summit in 2002) than a perfectly enunciated and polished homage to the Bard. It's not the risky adaptations but the lazy ones that do down Shakespeare.
But it is often those adaptations that declare their edginess, Bazzing-up the Bard with bovver-boots, booyakashas and bustiers, that fail Shakespeare's genius. This sort of approach is now so unoriginal that when you read "Morristown Community Players director Kevin Hiles announced Monday his bold intention to set his theater's production of William Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice in 16th-century Venice", you have to make sure that it's an Onion spoof.
The real problem with the lazy school of modern Shakespeare adaptations is that they manage to bypass Shakespeare's extraordinary insight into both human history and the human here-and-now. It's a schoolboy error to confuse Shakespeare's universalism for an easy identification with ourselves. What you end up with is the parboiled pop-psychology and over exegesis of Wright's Lady Macbeth. In the film's opening scene, we see Macbeth's wife weeping at a grave inscribed with the words "beloved son". Geddit? If not, later on there is a shot of a lonely swing swaying in the wind at Dunsinane. A news report featuring the murder of Macduff's cherubic boy is the tipping point.
I can't tell you now irritating I found this unnecessary and misguided bolt-on of a soap opera back-story. Modern-day dramaturges would do well to remember that when it comes to Shakespeare, the best adaptations came from, er, Shakespeare himself.
Wright's Macbeth is a film to forget, but which directors have had more success putting the Bard's plays into a new modern-day setting?
