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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

Terror at home

October 2, 2020 by Terry Teachout

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review a webcast of the 2009 PBS “Great Performances” made-for-TV film of Rupert Goold’s modern-dress Macbeth, starring Patrick Stewart. Here’s an excerpt.

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Shakespeare’s plays rarely come to Broadway, and when they do, it tends to be in the form of star-driven productions imported from England. Of these, the one that has lodged itself most firmly in my memory is Rupert Goold’s blood-soaked 2007 Chichester Theatre Festival staging of “Macbeth,” which later played in London’s West End and at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, transferring from there to Broadway’s Lyceum Theatre for a universally acclaimed eight-week run. Granted, its box-office success was due in substantial part to the presence in the cast of a TV star, Patrick Stewart. On the other hand, Mr. Stewart is also a stage actor of distinction, and Mr. Goold’s high-concept modern-dress production, which transplanted the action from 11th-century Scotland to an unnamed Soviet-bloc state, served the play exceptionally well.

It stood to reason that the BBC would film Mr. Goold’s “Macbeth” at the end of its extended travels, not as a “capture” of a live stage performance but as a full-fledged made-for-TV movie shot on location at England’s Welbeck Abbey. The small-screen version was shown in the U.S. in 2010 as an episode of PBS’ “Great Performances,” and it is now available for free viewing on the network’s website through the end of the year. The results are enormously impressive—in certain ways more so than the original stage version, memorable though it was…

High-concept Shakespeare productions too often fail to illuminate the play’s text, but this staging, in which the Stalinesque Macbeth and his vulpine wife (Kate Fleetwood) kill their way to the top of the churning heap of totalitarian power, plugs into the play smoothly and coherently….

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Read the whole thing here.

The trailer for Macbeth:

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Terry Teachout

Terry Teachout, who writes this blog, is the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary. In addition to his Wall Street Journal drama column and his monthly essays … [Read More...]

About

About “About Last Night”

This is a blog about the arts in New York City and the rest of America, written by Terry Teachout. Terry is a critic, biographer, playwright, director, librettist, recovering musician, and inveterate blogger. In addition to theater, he writes here and elsewhere about all of the other arts--books, … [Read More...]

About My Plays and Opera Libretti

Billy and Me, my second play, received its world premiere on December 8, 2017, at Palm Beach Dramaworks in West Palm Beach, Fla. Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, closed off Broadway at the Westside Theatre on June 29, 2014, after 18 previews and 136 performances. That production was directed … [Read More...]

About My Podcast

Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I are the panelists on “Three on the Aisle,” a bimonthly podcast from New York about theater in America. … [Read More...]

About My Books

My latest book is Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, published in 2013 by Gotham Books in the U.S. and the Robson Press in England and now available in paperback. I have also written biographies of Louis Armstrong, George Balanchine, and H.L. Mencken, as well as a volume of my collected essays called A … [Read More...]

The Long Goodbye

To read all three installments of "The Long Goodbye," a multi-part posting about the experience of watching a parent die, go here. … [Read More...]

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