Abstract
11 April 2020. My family and I have been confined at home since 14 March, following a strict lockdown that was initially decreed for a fortnight. In the Valencian autonomous region where we live, only one death was recorded at the official beginning of the pandemic, while a month later the dreaded figure is almost 800 (16 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants). Who would have thought? And yet, it is a comparatively mild situation, considering that on the same day, the Spanish authorities today registered almost 17,000 deaths in the whole country. Against this appalling panorama, life inside our house has positively intensified family bonding. We have lunch and dinner together every day; we chat for a long while after the midday meal; and my two children and I arrange a daily rendezvous to watch an episode of Game of Thrones. It was their initiative: first viewing for me, second for them.
Cahiers’ invitation to write about a play viewed during lockdown immediately made me think of the Shakespeare plays produced by Televisión Española (TVE, the Spanish state-owned broadcasting corporation) in the 1960s and early 1970s, and recently made available on its website. As with the BBC’s ‘Play of the Month’ and TF1’s ‘Au théâtre ce soir’, TVE adapted classical and contemporary plays to the relatively new audiovisual medium. At the time, watching TV was similarly a family bonding event, even more when TVE was the only television broadcaster. I asked my daughter which play she would like to watch, and she replied ‘Macbeth’. Why? She was just curious, as she knew about the play through a parodic episode in The Simpsons. I thought it may also have been because a few days earlier I had exclaimed, ‘This is Lady Macbeth’, when we heard the cruel and ambitious queen Cersei Lannister say ‘I should have been born a man’ in series 2, episode 9, of Game of Thrones; in the next episode, I related Theon Greyjoy’s confession of criminal excess ‘I’ve gone too far to pretend to be anything else’ to Macbeth’s ‘I am in blood / Stepped in so far, that should I wade no more / Returning were as tedious as go o’er’ (3.4.134–6).
The Spanish-language TVE adaptation of Macbeth was first aired on 28 September 1966, in the ‘Estudio 1’ evening programme. My 27-inch computer screen is larger than the first black-and-white, cathode-ray-tube TV set we had at home. This telly presided over the dining room, sitting on a purpose-built piece of furniture, and dictated our daily entertainment schedule. Today, our lockdown theatre-on-TV experience takes place in my study, ourselves sitting on office armchairs on wheels, on a cloudy, gloomy afternoon not unfitting for the show we are about to see after my click of the mouse.
A persistent, dissonant, undefinable sound, punctuated by strokes of a concert bass drum and spells of laughter by unseen women creates an eerie atmosphere, accompanying a lengthy tracking shot showing the leafless trees of an obviously artificial, studio-set wood. It takes almost two minutes until we see two human figures walking through the trees, clad in heavy medieval overcoats with sheepskin cape tops that inevitably remind us of the IKEA-rug-inspired capes of the Brothers of Night’s Watch in Game of Thrones. Macbeth (Francisco Piquer) and Banquo (José María Escuer) stop and confront three mature women dressed in rags and each with a hairy spot on their faces, who hieratically deliver the known prophecies. On a drumroll of timpani, the women vanish through a three-person medium shot that dissolves into a dead-quiet spot of the wood for Banquo and Macbeth to step into in astonishment. About five minutes into the film, the title credits, superimposed on a rough stone wall while a solo timpano plays a slow dead march, advertise it as free adaptation for TV by Pedro Amalio López, based on a ‘version’ by José María Rincón. Amalio López was one of the pioneers in TVE, and had already directed many television productions, including Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar in 1965.
The play’s third scene, continuing after the credit titles, confirms the conventional use of close-up shots for the protagonist’s monologues and asides. An extreme close-up when Macbeth delivers his aside ‘Stars, hide your fires…’ (1.4.50) cuts, after a stroke of the bass drum, to a wide shot with Lady Macbeth (Irene Gutiérrez Caba) standing at the end of a gloomy, bare Norman-arched corridor, lit only by a torch. As she reads her husband’s letter, she approaches the still camera until she stops, the frame just above her waist, and delivers her monologue ‘Glamis thou art…’ (1.5.15). Just before her second soliloquy, ‘The raven himself is hoarse…’ (1.5.38), with the action now set on the battlements, two small crows are shown on one of the merlons, and one of them opens its beak twice as we hear two artificial, badly recorded croaks. In another obvious visualisation, the studio lights are dimmed as Lady Macbeth says, ‘Come, thick light’ (1.5.50). The rest of 1.5 shows Lady Macbeth in a new dress, as if indicating a more realistic passing of time since her husband’s arrival had been announced. The Macbeths’ first appearance together is introduced by a close-up of Macbeth’s hand being covered by his wife’s. Lady Macbeth’s costume is dominated by a wimple, very much like the one worn by Zoe Caldwell in Paul Almond’s 1961 TV Macbeth for Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. This emphasises the intensity of her facial gestures: intent looks and eyebrows raised denote a strong, self-confident personality with sparkles of the demoniac.
The film, which runs for 99 minutes, heavily cuts text. Omissions include whole scenes (1.1, 1.2, and the killing of Macduff’s family in 4.2) and significant fragments (most of the ‘Is this a dagger…’ soliloquy and the Porter episode in 2.3). In a common transposition, Macbeth dies after delivering ‘Life’s but a walking shadow…Signifying nothing’ (5.5.23–7). The script also adds a few lines (for instance, when Macbeth, after addressing ‘You [sic] should have died hereafter’ to his dead wife (5.5.16), anticipates his tragic end by saying ‘I will meet with you today. I will not keep you waiting for long’). Malcolm’s final speech omits all reference to the return of ‘exiled friends abroad / That fled the snares of watchful tyranny’ (5.9.32–3) – a delicate issue during Franco’s dictatorship. Two intermissions cut the flow of the action roughly into thirds: at the end of Act 2 and after the Apparitions in 4.1, but my daughter and I played the streaming version continuously, as we do with the episodes of Game of Thrones. (It would have been interesting to see what commercials were shown in the intervals in 1966.)
Overall, the production conveys the tragedy’s essential conflicts, psychological insights, and poetic flights in the tradition of nineteenth-century readings of the play (I follow in this Bernice W. Kliman’s analysis of George Schaefer’s 1954 TV adaptation in her ‘Shakespeare in Performance’ monograph on Macbeth). The Spanish production’s strength lies in the acting (including the eloquent oral delivery) of the main players, all of them experienced stage actors. Piquer and Gutiérrez Caba play a mature couple who never hug, rub cheeks, or kiss (passion is sexless in Amalio López’s adaptation). Macduff (Tomás Blanco, also the Tucumcari sheriff in Sergio Leone’s western Per qualche dollaro in più [For a Few Dollars More]) and Malcolm (Julio Núñez) deliver a poignant 10-minute English scene (4.3) that climaxes with Macduff in tears crying ‘But Macbeth has no children!’ Some of the secondary roles reveal rather stagey acting. The soldiers’ unconvincing camouflage with boughs from Birnam Wood and the sword fights disappointed my daughter, used as she is to the realistic fights and battles in Game of Thrones, and she seemed unconvinced by my explanation that filmic realism is not the television adaptation’s objective.
The camera work is mainly based on medium and close-up shots, as is conventional in films for ‘the small screen’, that focus on the players’ expressivity, and on relatively long takes. There is very little use of Welles-like high and low angles or of wide-angle lenses, and some choices of camera movement denote an attempt at artistic articulation. The final take, for instance, begins with a close-up of Malcolm delivering his last words, and then, for one minute, the camera zooms out to frame, in a wide shot, the victors looking down on Macbeth’s dead body, and, from this point, slowly moves further away along a corridor, revealing more and more dead soldiers lying on the floor. As my daughter and I watched this final moment, with casualties increasing in number as the solo timpano played a slow dead march, we could not help thinking of the growing number of casualties caused by the current pandemic that has us confined at home: over 27,000 deaths in Spain on 2 June 2020. The dead in Game of Thrones (we are on the last season) do not invite the same degree of tragic realisation.