The Shakespeare Project

As with The Playlist, the rules are simple: one track for every production, so long as it captures something of the essence of the play (or production).

Coriolanus

Ralph Fiennes, 2012.

John Logan’s script for Ralph Fiennes’ Coriolanus is, like the film, robust, muscular, tremendously masculine, and uncompromisingly contemporary. Set in a place calling itself Rome, it is full of Brutalist concrete apartment blocks, empty streets, protesting citizens and power-hungry policiticans and power-brokers. As Coriolanus himself, Fiennes has the menace, the gravitas and the unnervingly steely gaze of the once-popular general gone bad. As his nemesis Aufidius, Gerard Butler also has the menace and requisite air of danger about him, and in their confrontations, you really do believe they could quite easily kill each other. Filled with muted colours and steely concrete greys, browns, army-fatigue greens and lots of mud, ice and dirt, it is a brutal look at the power that corrupts, corruption that empowers, how hard it is to fight to be heard, and how easily things can go wrong. Again, it’s not a film for the purists, but it is an intense, muscular and thrilling film, pared down with considerable skill and flair by Logan, without losing any of Shakespeare’s humanist touches and flourishes. 

The Tempest

Julie Taymor, 2010.

In The Tempest, Julie Taymor creates another visual feast from Shakespeare’s rich text. Eschewing ‘traditional’ modes of producing cinematic Shakespeares, she filmed the majority of her film on the islands of Hawai’i – the black rock, deep orange gorges, lush tidal forests, rocky shores, cliffs and colours the perfect complement for her vision of sorcery, magic, redemption and love. Prospera’s island, as in the play, becomes a reflection of isolation, creating a new hierarchical order in a ‘new world’, and becomes a kind of antithetical evocation of Donne’s famous observation that ‘no man is an island’. Helen Mirren’s Prospera is a force of nature to be reckoned with, and while the decision to make Shakespeare’s magician a woman was always going to be controversial for many people, I actually prefer it to Shakespeare’s original, simply because there is so much more at stake, between Prospera and Miranda, between both of them and Ferdinand, between Caliban, towards the court and the usurping Duke. While her visuals are excellent and her cast, crew and rough magic all superb, it doesn’t quite reach the insane heights of Titus’ carnivalesque, though it is hard to distinguish exactly how or why. 

As You Like It

Kenneth Branagh, 2006.

Renowned for his popular interpretations of Shakespeare on film, Kenneth Branagh directed As You Like It for BBC/HBO. And while it might not have reached the popular success of his Henry V or Much Ado About Nothing, there is a lot to love in it, most notably Bryce Dallas Howard’s charming, believable and utterly beguiling Rosalind. Filmed on location in Kew Gardens, it is set in Japan after it opened its doors to Western trade and technology in the mid 1800s. Roughly analogous in setting to The Last Samurai, it too features samurai warriors and ninjas, as well as Kevin Kline’s superbly melancholic Jacques, Alfred Molina’s tail-coat-clad Touchstone, and Romola Garai’s gullible and injury-prone Celia. But the film belongs to Howard’s Rosalind, whether you believe her transformation into Ganymede or not. Her capriciousness, delight, glee, sadness, tenderness, affection and mercuriality are all tangible, and by its end you feel as though you too could love her. And in a moment of rare genius, Branagh’s epilogue – with Howard-as-Rosalind-as-herself – is one of the more effective translations from page to screen in this Shakespeare film. Treat yourself. You might just be surprised, and find it’s, well, just as you like it.

Titus

Julie Taymor, 1999.

Prior to studying The Tempest in Year Twelve, my English teacher showed us the first ten minutes of Titus. I was captivated by the child playing at the kitchen table with his toy soldiers; the bold choral, almost fanfare-like music, that heralded the arrival of the army; the soldiers, like full-sized copies of the child’s figurines, clothed in armour and leather, accompanied by motorbikes; the prisoners and spoils of war contained in chariots and carts pulled by horses and tanks; the heightened dance-like movement of the foot soldiers, and the authoritarian address by Titus Andronicus to his people; the way time periods and styles collided against one another with such force that their anachronistic existences were totally justified within the deserted coliseum, the original theatre of cruelty. The rest of the film is nothing short of engrossing, yet also harrowing and exhaustingly exhilarating in a heightened poetic way. Filmed on location in Italy and Croatia, and at Cinecittà Studios in Rome, it mixes time periods like smells in a market place, and concocts the giddiest of pies from its ingredients. Her locations, when coupled with Shakespeare’s text, become metaphors for the psychological worlds of the characters, encapsulating emotional throughlines of scenes, sequences and acts. There is also a frequent and often subtle use of the hand as a visual device – it is both a blackly ironic statement as well as an examination of the nature and politics of power, revenge and violence. Taymor’s ideograph of the hand can be traced in almost every scene – a boy plays at his kitchen table, ripping limbs from his toy soldiers and dousing them in tomato sauce, all in frenetic close-up; senators acknowledge crowds and ask for silence; Basianus holds Lavinia close, out of Saturninus’s reach; Titus fatally stabs his own son; a large stone hand lies crumbling in a public square, its extended finger seeming to grope at the square’s occupants; Titus’ hand is chopped off in a twisted act of salvation; his daughter, Lavinia, is raped and has her hands cut off and replaced by useless twigs; Aaron the Moor protects his infant son from soldiers, cradling him in his arms; Titus breaks Lavinia’s neck with his bare hands in a desperate albeit merciful act towards the film’s conclusion. In its final shot, there is the rarest of rays of hope, as Young Lucius carries Aaron’s infant son from the coliseum, as Elliot Goldenthal’s luscious (and frequently anachronistic) score offers a way out, a way to break the circle of violence and revenge. Granted, it’s not to everyone’s tastes, and many people will disagree with it, but I think it is a tremendously bold, audacious and quite successful rendering of one of Shakespeare’s earliest plays.

William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet

Baz Luhrmann, 1996.

Year Nine English. Romeo and Juliet. Imagine you’re fourteen, at an all-boy’s school (for the time being), and hormones are flying everywhichway, when along comes this play about love and all its heady adrenaline-thumping rushing glory. It’s got everything for nearly-fifteen year olds – swordfights, love and exile, (with only the slight hiccup of a death (or two or four) to dampen the mood). Enter, then, Baz Luhrmann’s hyperactive reimagining. In Luhrmann’s film, moreso than the play (at least on the page), you get sucked into its heady world, it catches you up in its frenetic exuberance and brashness, and disgorges you at the end, exhausted and exhilarated. For many years afterwards, I couldn’t listen to Radiohead without thinking of Leonardo DiCaprio’s Hawaiian shirt or Clare Danes’ angel wings. Despite all its detractors, it’s not a bad place to start watching Shakespeare on film, nor is a bad film by itself. If anything, it’s quite good, even if it is its own cliché (the play as much as the film). But I spose when you’re almost fifteen, you don’t really care.