Screen Macbeths
In this piece of work I hope to compare three different screen versions of the witches scene on video. The first was the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production directed by Trevor Nunn (1978), it was filmed from a stage production. The second was the film directed by Roman Polanski (1971) and was made for cinema. Last and by most means least was the Thames video collection version, directed by Charles Warren (1988) and was made for television.
Macbeth: The Royal Shakespeare Company.
The scene opens with a zoom in to the stage floor from directly above it. There is atmospheric music, played on a church organ with some flat sounding notes that, to me, indicates presence. Once the camera has stopped zooming, the characters appear from the outside of the stage casting strange shadows across the stage. The camera then pans across all the characters, after this lengthy process is over, the king comes out from the ring of actors and kneels on the floor and prays, then from the circle appear the 3 witches. One of the witches seems to be having some kind of fit and the other witches seem to be encouraging it, near the end of the fit the witch begins to give out information to the other two witches as though the fit gives her information, after each segment of spasmic knowledge the other two witches seem to be surprised. On the last line “Fair is foul and foul is fair….”, the witches are out of sync and that makes me think that they are getting the speech from somewhere else. The costumes were good but they looked more like costumes than clothes. The lighting was atmospheric and it went well with the slow moving camera. I found this scene slightly too long and dragged out but it was performed well. Hardly any props or sound effects were used.
