Customer Reviews

Shakespeare Retold

5 star:		(28)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

As an English professor always looking for new perspectives on Shakespeare for my students, I watched these enthusiastically. Aside from Midsummer, which focuses too much on Theseus and Hippolyta's marriage and is very dark,these are terrific. The best stars in the English firmament make up these casts. The best is Shrew -- Shirley Henderson, Harry Potter's Moaning Myrtle all grown up (metaphorically, she's a tiny person) is a miniature nuclear bomb, and Rufus Sewell is absolutely edible. The elevator scene is hysterical. Twiggy is also great as her former model mother ushering around her current model sister, Bianca. I've been waiting for these on this side of the pond for a year now!

As a lifelong lover of the Bard, and yearly attendee and patron of a Shakespeare festival, I was very wary of purchasing these DVDs and seeing them, but I was especially pleased with these storylines and the production quality.

The Taming of the Shrew and Much Ado About Nothing are standouts; each warrant the purchase price of the set. But MacBeth and A Midsummer Night's Dream are no slackers, either! The acting is overall superb, the music and lighting and sets very well done, and for once, the chemistry between the leads was flawlessly believable. The modernization of Shakespeare's language was so well orchestrated, and the parallels between Shakespeare's day and the modern world so well done, I loved these productions.

Perhaps not for the overly devout Shakespeare fan who sighs at every missed line or nuance, but I have to give these my highest rating as they are excellent modern versions of Shakespeare's plays.

I viewed these originally on BBCAmerica and then purchased them...so glad I did.
This version of "Macbeth" was the standout for me. It kept most of the themes while translating the story to a modern kitchen. While a tragedy, this was also the funniest of the four: some marvelous lines and even better performances from Hawes and McAvoy. McAvoy's boyish looks and small stature served to reenforce his subservience to his wife, a sleek, insinuating, and ultimately tragic Ella Macbeth. Hawes performance, especially the dissolving into madness was touching and controlled: no scenery was chewed in the making of this story.
The same cannot be said for "Shrew". Rufus Sewell was brilliant and Shirley Henderson over the top (as usual, but it works here.) Henderson's voice is an acquired taste so it you don't like it, don't bother with this but you'll be robbed of Sewell's delicious turn. The ending was a disappointment and knocked this from an A to a B-.
The Damian Lewis/Sarah Parrish "Much Ado" was mildly funny and passed the time but I've no desire to see it again.
I think the "Midsummer Night's Dream" was a bit too ambitious and ended up bit of a mess. Some wonderful performers who needed a stronger director?

While other reviews are rightfully praising the BBC's updating of "Taming Of The Shrew" and "Much Ado About Nothing," it's worth noting that the version of "Macbeth" in this series is absolutely outstanding.

The witches are bin men (garbage collectors), the principals are chefs entwined in the jealousies generated by a restaurant review, and the overall execution is a perfect blend of darkness, madness and hubris. It's probably the most true-to-source adaptation in the series and yet another reason to get this series.

And, as a footnote, I agree with the previous sentiment that the tone and focus of "Midsummer Night's Dream" is off, but it's still well-done.

What would Shakespeare plays be like if you took away the poetry, the great speeches, all that wonderful language, and left only the plots?

We find out in this collection of four Shakespeare plays adapted, shortened and brought up to date. The results are uneven but mainly pretty entertaining without ever being Shakespearian.

The best of the four is the first -- "The Taming of the Shrew" -- due to the wonderful Shirley Henderson who always enlivens whatever project she graces with her talent. Here, she is a formidable mini-Margaret Thatcher aiming to become leader of the British conservative party, terrorizing her male aides and her silly supermodel sister. The adaption finds some neat ways to temper the sexism of the original to make it more palatable to modern sensibilities. It's an amusing romp.

The weakest of the four in "Midsummer's Night's Dream" set in a theme park. It has some bright moments, notably the depiction of Bottom as a clueless, wannabe stand-up comedian who is desperately unfunny. But the magic doesn't work outside the Forest of Arden.

"Much Ado Abotu Nothing," set in a local TV newsroom, was pleasant enough. Don John, the villain in the original, here becomes rather pathetic and creepy instead of just evil.

"Macbeth" with James McAvoy, is set in a three-Michelin star restaurant and is downright weird. Again, the plot doesn't work in the modern setting and without the language, the play loses its grandeur and degenerates into a bloodfest.

It strikes me that our enjoyment of these pieces stems from our familiarity of the originals. I enjoyed seeing how the adapters reshaped the original material. For instance the members of the watch from "Much Ado" become hapless security men. Banquo's ghost makes his presence felt first through a cellphone message. The three witches are three garbage collectors ("bin men" in English slang). I was curious how Birnam Wood would come to Dunsinane. The result was a big disappointment.

If we didn't know the originals and were viewing these plays for the first time, we might find them pleasantly diverting but it's unlikely we'd regard them as masterpieces.

I do not claim to be am expert at Shakespeare, but I have worked on many of the bard's productions including all the one's included within this set. That being said, I think overall the aim was achieved very successfully.
My personal favorite was the version of 'Macbeth'. It seemed truest to the actual story and I think the acting was absoultely superb. Shakespeare's tragedies are sometimes very difficult to produce, moreso than his comedies, and I think this succeeds any and all expectations I had when coming in.
The other three productions are nothing to scoff at either. They too are acted quite well, although I thought some of Shakespeare's cleverest themes were disgarded or dumbed down for the 90-minute window. It was a little disappointing actually, but I would still recommend this set to those interested in learning Shakespeare.
But, my biggest recommendation is to read the plays as well as going to live theatre to hear the true words. Experience the reason we still produce his works today.

Although I got this for Richard Armitage's all too brief appearance in Macbeth, the Taming of the Shrew alone is worth the price of the 2-disc set. The Bard's bawdy battle between the sexes has been cleverly updated but still holds true to the original. I have always admired Shirley Henderson (Frozen) but mistakenly thought of Rufus Sewell (Cold Comfort Farm) mainly as a pretty face. Boy, was I wrong! His BAFTA nominated performance here is amazing. It also has a great supporting cast, nice set design and costuming (Kate's wedding dress is a wonder) and the music is fancifully scored.

The unsympathetic role of the shrewish Katherine can be difficult to pull off but the diminutive Ms. Henderson reaches out and grabs you by the throat and then tugs at your heartstrings! When Sewell's penniless but swaggering Petruchio shows up fresh from job hunting in Australia (heralded by a didgeridoo leitmotif) and determines he will marry the wealthy spinster politician, the laughs never stop. I have never seen a more hysterically funny wedding! Off on their Italian villa honeymoon, Kate is a nasty piece of work and Petruchio gives as good as he gets. Even in connubial fury, both actors still convey the desire to be loved that we all have. The black and white montage finale wraps up the whole story in a most amusing group of photos.

Briefly to sum up the remaining stories: a trendy nose-to-tail restaurant is the setting for the bloody Macbeth. It has a great-cast (James McAvoy and Keeley Hawes are the MacBeths) but somehow murdering Duncan over Michelin stars diminishes the story. However, head waiter MacDuff (RA) can serve me any meal he wishes, preferably breakfast in bed! A Midsummer's Night's has a distinguished cast but its humor is too medieval for me. Much Ado About Nothing is updated to a newsroom locale and some viewers may like it but I was already seduced by the shrew.

This BBC Video of 4 plays stands head and shoulders above numerous of the so-called authentic Shakespearean productions I've had to endure in many years of theatergoing. First of all, it has an integrity forecast in its very title, "Shakespeare Retold." Thus we expect to be and happily are spared those half-baked, clueless productions that set an Elizabethan play with its original language intact, say, in 19th-century Tierra del Fuego, believing that the universal can be achieved through the set and costume designer's contempt for historical particulars.

The plays in this DVD set, on the contrary, have all been reconceived and rewritten as contemporary works, sharing to some extent Shakespeare's stories, but not his plots and only glimmers now and again of his grand language. In their own right, they are undeniably entertaining, if ultimately small scale, melodrama or farce. "Macbeth," hewing most closely to its incomparable predecessor, is in my view the finest of the lot. James McAvoy and Keeley Hawes, as an ambitious, future celebrity chef and his enabling wife, turn in ferocious performances which call to mind the best of film noir. Theirs is great acting in melodrama.

Teachers may find it useful, by the way, to set this version next to Shakespeare's and have students discern the differences between expert melodrama and sublime high tragedy. Many will quickly see that all the blood and gore that grabs their interest in the melodrama is part and parcel of the Shakespearean work, which probes the characters more deeply and extends their actions beyond private life or minor celebrity, thus transcending its melodramatic origins. Many of them will further conclude - and quite rightly - that great tragic art, far from being genteel, is the melodrama they love, plus. Also to its credit, this modern "Macbeth" eschews ethical pioneering of the sort that blemishes the modern "Much Ado," which has a Hero who's in fact slept with some jerky guy "out of sympathy" before her true love Claudio, here called Claude, comes on the scene. This modern Hero in her ethics reminded me of a student I once taught who declared after reading "Othello" that Desdemona HAD slept with Cassio, but that she'd done so before her engagement to Othello, so the Moor had no reason to be upset. Fortunately, the modern "Macbeth" is free of any ethical pandering. The only absurdity it might lead students to is the question of how many children Lady Macbeth had since Shakespeare's heroine admits she has "given suck" and in the modern version the pathetic/villainous wife and her husband are supplied with a kid who died in infancy. But this sort of literal minded question applied to poetic drama is, of course, much more easily disposed of than the ethically confused decisions of the Othello student or her soulmate, the contemporary Hero.

This review is about the Macbeth episode. I chose to write this to counter the Amazon review provided, particularly in response the line: "Does this mean now that every movie about murderous jealousy is Shakespeare Retold?" in regards to the Macbeth retelling.

The Amazon reviewer makes it sound as if the plot is so generally about jealousy that it loses, or neglects, the complexities of its source material--it does not. Anyone remotely familiar with Macbeth would recognize the structure of the story, the character development, and the themes from the Scottish play. They do a fantastic job keeping the pace, the terror, and the nuances of the actual play while modernizing the context in which these elements unfold. It is a clever, and just retelling. I am thinking about using several scenes to help develop understanding with my students, to make the play more accessible.

The Amazon reviewer fails to understand that jealousy is probably the most elemental narrative evolving throughout the play, as if Macbeth, in its play--Shakespeare written--form were simply a play about jealousy. This is a vast oversimplification and likely explains why the reviewer failed to pick up on the subtleties of the retelling that make it much more akin to Shakespeare's Macbeth than a simple story about green ambition.

I have to say I loved 3 out of the 4. Midsummer night's dream didn't have the magnificant actors that the others had. Nonetheless, I loved Taming of the Shrew and Macbeth. THose 2 are brilliant. How can you get better than James McAvoy, Richard Armitage, Keely Hawes and Shirley Henderson?you just can't.