Drop The Dead Baby

Rating: 4/10 (6 October 2015)

The people who will get the most out of this new version of Macbeth are those who saw the Polanski version because they will now know that nothing could be as bad as that and people who never saw the Orson Welles version because they don;t know just how well it can be done. The thing about Shakespeare of course is that every semi- amateur thinks he is the one who has cracked it and too many times these semi-amateurs have names like Baz Luhrmann and Roman Polanski who have the aspirations to make Citizen Kane and the talent to make a road company Gidget Goes Hawaaian. Which brings us to this latest offering; again we are in the hands of someone who knows just how to improve it into a failure, beginning with something masquerading as a music score sounding as if it were cobbled together by Michael Nyman whilst in an induced coma. Then comes an opening scene which Shakespeare did not feel it necessary to include or even allude to, in which a dead baby is cremated as the Macbeths - possibly the parents - look on. If we exclude Marion Cotillard who offers by far the finest performance the whole thing is good for a tax-break only.