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Twelfth Night Like 2002's terrific
Othello, Tim Supple's
Twelfth 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-tech
Hamlet (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. This
Twelfth Night lacks the lyricism that distinguished Trevor Nunn's cinematic adaptation, but creates a new and intriguing world of its own.
--Kathleen C. Fennessy Macbeth
Gussying 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, this Macbeth offers nothing new. --Bruce Reid
Product Description
Twelfth Night This classic Shakespeare comedy of disguise and mistaken identity follows twins Viola and Sebastian, asylum seekers who are separated and washed up on the strange island of Illyria – a contemporary, multicultural London dreamscape that is both soulful and sensual, yet dark and dangerous. Parminder Nagra (
Bend It Like Beckham) and Chiwetel Ejiofor (
Dirty Pretty Things) star in this story about the loneliness of exile, the pain of loss and the madness of love in this contemporary screen adaptation of
Twelfth Night.
Macbeth Using Shakespeare's classic text,
Macbeth is set in a timeless zone somewhere in the twentieth century against a raw, urban industrial environment, giving the film a surreal quality. The abstracted setting puts this version of
Macbeth alongside other modern treatments of Shakespeare, such as Baz Luhrmann's
Romeo + Juliet. Starring Greta Scacchi (
Emma,
The Player),
Macbeth is a deeply thought-provoking portrait of Macbeth and his Lady, and how the two characters sow the seeds of their own destruction. This is a
Macbeth as never seen before, offering newcomers and Shakespeare lovers alike a memorable experience with one of Shakespeare’s darkest tragedies.
