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Jubal (film)
What happens to Othello if Desdemona is actually trying to get into bed with Cassio? This is at the heart of Russell S. Hughes and director Delmer Daves’s screenplay for Jubal, a (very) loose appropriation of elements of Shakespeare’s play, mapped onto a classic Western structure. But by centering the story on the Cassio figure…
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The Tragedy of Macbeth (film)
Films of Macbeth have a fraught relationship with space. It’s a play whose own spaces – psychic, architectural, geographic, emotional, supernatural – are particularly fluid, and whose tautness paradoxically combines abstraction with the impression of nuanced interiority. To capture the play’s juxtapositions within the conventions of mainstream screen naturalism isn’t an easy task, and thus most films…
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As You Like It (film)
Hannes Rall’s animated film of As You Like It, created in collaboration with the Shakespeare Institute, draws on a range of influences from South East Asia to offer a short retelling that would fit neatly alongside the classic S4C Animated Tales. In just 26 minutes, the film covers a surprising amount of ground from the play, with a…
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The Winter’s Tale/Le Conte d’Hiver (Shakespeare in the Ruins) @ The Trappist Monastery Ruins (film)
Winnipeg’s Shakespeare in the Ruins has been producing Shakespeare in the picturesque Trappist Monastery Ruins since the early 1990s. While so many outdoor-based theatre companies around the world have been among the first to return to in-person performances during the second year of the COVID-19 pandemic, artistic director Rodrigo Beilfuss has been more ambitious, spearheading the company’s…
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Romeo and Juliet (National Theatre) (film)
A group of actors gather in a rehearsal room, chatting and laughing; we cut to them sat in chairs, making up three sides of a large square. It looks like meet-and-greet day, only there’s no director, no box set to show. Instead, it’s one of the actors, Lucian Msamati, who speaks, and he’s speaking the Prologue.…
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Romeo + Juliet (Metcalfe Gordon Productions) (film)
For almost a year, now, there have been few opportunities to see new productions of Shakespeare inside a theatre; fewer still where actors are able to touch, to interact. Metcalfe Gordon Productions’ new theatre-film hybrid production of Romeo and Juliet is an experiment in using technology to reproduce what has been lost, filming the actors (mostly) separately…
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Ophelia (film)
John Everett Millais’s ‘Ophelia’ is a defining pre-Raphaelite work, and a profound interpretive influence on Hamlet, on stage and on screen. It’s the starting point for Claire McCarthy’s film of the same name, as Daisy Ridley’s Ophelia spreads her arms and flowers in a lake and slowly sinks beneath the water. The painting renders Ophelia passive, a victim, a portrait of…
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King of Texas (film)
Among the many Western adaptations of King Lear, King of Texas is one of the straightest, acknowledging the debt in its opening credits, and casting Patrick Stewart as John Lear, head of one of the largest cattle ranches in the newly independent Republic of Texas And yet, while it mostly follows the plot points (and often the dialogue, appropriately adjusted…
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The King (film)
The King clearly sees the potential, in a post-Game of Thrones world, for the story of the Henry IV/Henry V plays to become the basis for a gritty, f-bomb-dropping, twenty-first-century medievalist fantasy of heroism and difficult choices and violence. The material is right there in the corrupt older generation, the sneering enemies, the balance of personal stakes and large-scale…
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All Is True (film)
All is True is the obvious culmination of Kenneth Branagh’s career – after thirty years of making Shakespeare films, he has finally cast himself as Shakespeare. From Branagh’s silicone-augmented performance to the Patrick Doyle score to the sun-bathed bucolic backdrops, All is True is a Branagh film through and through, for good and for ill. The film follows…
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Dr Peter Kirwan 