Twelfth Night/Macbeth
Twelfth NightLike 2002's terrificOthello, Tim Supple'sTwelfth Night, or What You Will, was made for British television and is set in the present. The style, however, is closer to Michael Almereyda’s high-techHamlet(the dialogue is similarly un-modernized). Further, Supple takes a multi-racial approach, although the story isn't as easy to follow (it helps to be familiar with the original play). In this version, Viola (Bend It Like Beckham's Parminder Nagra) is an Indian stowaway who washes up on Illyria, where she disguises herself as "Cesario" and befriends Orsino (Dirty Pretty Things' Chiwetel Ejiofor). In short order, she falls for him, while Olivia (Claire Price) falls for her. Her twin, Sebastian (Ronny Jhutti), meanwhile, thinks she has drowned. Confusion reins until all is sorted out at the end. ThisTwelfth Nightlacks the lyricism that distinguished Trevor Nunn's cinematic adaptation, but creates a new and intriguing world of its own.--Kathleen C. FennessyMacbethGussying up the characters in leather jackets and denims and replacing broadswords with automatic rifles, this British television version of Shakespeare's play is fitfully inventive, but more often merely thrashes about, enamored of its own sound and fury. The best guess for when director Michael Bogdanov intends the play to be set is some Mad Max-ish future, based on the abandoned industrial building he uses for the castle at Dunsinane; the seemingly iconoclastic choice actually reveals how confused and incoherent this production is. The dingy brick exterior is neither a believable seat of power nor a visual manifestation of precivilized barbarity (as were the papier-mâché caves in Orson Welles's unfairly maligned film version). In the end it's just a warehouse, so why are its inhabitants walking about in tuxedoes and seating themselves at elegantly laid-out banquet tables? Only because, it seems, the imagery looks cool; and that should not be reason enough. Hand in hand with the confused visuals comes an indifferent grasp on character: Sean Pertwee and Greta Scacchi both do fine work as the Scottish usurper and his lady, but they don't bring anything fresh or original to the roles (both of which have admittedly been pretty well explored by now). Some vaguely annoying visuals aside, thisMacbethoffers nothing new.--Bruce Reid