Cheap Macbeth / McKellen, Dench (Thames Shakespeare Collection) (DVD) (Philip Casson) Price

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Customer Reviews of Macbeth / McKellen, Dench (Thames Shakespeare Collection)

Awesome Judi
If you are a Dame Judi Dench fan and you haven't seen Macbeth, you're missing a most ingenious performance. She never fails to entertain and this phenomenal award winning actress will really astound you with this rivetting performance. In the entertainment business there are good actors and great performers...Jude is "entertainment squared" in Macbeth. <
>In one part she emits the most eeriest primal scream I've ever heard. With Dame Judi she makes you believe she is the character in a way no one else can. Dench fans..this is a must.

A performance of historic importance.
Trevor Nunn's 1979 Thames Television production of "Macbeth," directed by Philip Casson, is a dark, stripped-down, claustrophobic version that emphasizes the furnace-fire terror of Shakespeare's play. As star Ian McKellen tells us in an introduction and reminiscence included in the DVD's special features, the broadcast documents a production of the play that had been running, with the same cast, for the previous three years in Stratford and London. The cast had become a family by then, he tells us, and its members were so in tune with each other that the film took less than a week to shoot, rather than the usual several weeks. The sheer fluidity of the performances attests to the teamwork the cast members had achieved. The camera, shooting mostly in close-up, offers the actors nowhere to hide; they must give us the whole, unvarnished truth of the story with their faces and voices, and that they do. McKellen makes a brilliantly Stalinesque Macbeth, spiraling unforgettably into murder, paranoia, and nihilism. Judi Dench is, if anything, even better than McKellen; the extended, ripped-flesh scream she rips from herself during Lady Macbeth's final soliloquy seems to emanate from the Ninth Circle of Hell. Also notable are Roger Rees as Malcolm, John Woodvine as Banquo, and Ian McDiarmid as Ross. Not all of the performances, alas, are on this level. Although McKellen pays loving tribute to the late Bob Peck in his reminiscence, I found Peck's performance as Macduff inexplicable at times. (When a man hears that his wife and children have been murdered, don't you think his reaction would be a little less, well, CLINICAL?) Nevertheless, this has to be counted as a Shakespearian performance of historic importance, with the two greatest Shakespearian actors of the late 20th century giving us their definitive versions of Lord and Lady Macbeth. This is a must-buy for anyone with even the slightest interest in Shakespeare.