Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * *

Cast: Michael Fassbender, Elizabeth Debicki, Marion Cotillard, Sean Harris, David Thewlis, Jack Reynor, Paddy Considine, David Hayman, Lynn Kennedy, Maurice Roëves, Seylan Baxter, James Harkness, Roy Sampson.

There are moments when going to the cinema should be a true joy to behold. The merging of both the cinematic experience and theatre portrayed as a guiding light of how to bring out the very best from arguably England’s greatest playwright.

Macbeth should be the play, alongside Hamlet and Henry V, that stirs passion, which gives the lover of acting the reason to attend such performances and to which the sense of history and of Time that stands between today’s so called enlightened society and the past that haunts these great lands can grasp and easily identify with. It should never fail to deliver.

The latest offering for cinema audiences starring Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard unfortunately does not deliver where it matters and the frustration of so many fans of Shakespeare’s work is to be heard at the bruising, almost tearing apart of a story that has enraptured millions.

It is nonetheless important to note just how good other productions are, whether on stage or filmed for cinema, in comparison, for the film seems to wish to be taken as such that resemblance to Roman Polanski’s 1971 version is to be seen in the way that the stylisation and narrative flow, with its willingness to adapt certain scenes for effect, are taken and developed. Yet even after all the ways in which the film could have been captured and perhaps re-told, it falls far below that offered by Polanski at the very height of his imagination and with the disturbing and brutal images still fresh in his mind from his personal life’s harrowing depression.

Chiefly amongst it all is the depiction of Lady Macbeth, easily one of the most gratifying and alluring characters written by Shakespeare, a part for which any female actor worth her salt would dream of playing, is unforgivably turned into a wreck of a woman. There is no manipulation, no strength of feminine will and the end result is one that feels like wet putty being moulded into a more interesting shape, a shadow of what the great part demands.

Whilst the dark relationship between murderer and co-conspirator is sadly lacking, the scenes and the tension are built up with taste and intrigue, sadly though the distinct lack of understanding put over on the state of Macbeth’s mind as he sinks into remorse of murderous gain and the spectres that haunt his thoughts, is enough to weep at the lack of vision portrayed on screen.

Visually beautiful, the gore and bloodshed well captured but in terms of a cast giving arguably one of Shakespeare’s finest plays the treatment it fully deserves, it can be suggested that this type of adaptation is why many young possible theatre goers shy away from the experience. A great play, one of the finest ever written, treated with lack of conscious, respect and true reverence.

Ian D. Hall