o for a muse of fire!
PODHORETZ, JOHN
Movies O FOR A MUSE OF FlREl By John Podhoretz When the plays of Shakespeare are brought to the screen, directors usually take liberties with the text. They cut and rearrange scenes, set them in...
...Forget it...
...The Greeks and Romans...
...A close-up on the transvestite sister's face when she is close to the duke brings out both the love of his proximity and the pain of her predicament...
...But there have been many notable Shakespeare films...
...Even the play's comic roustabouts, who live with the noblewoman, are sick with longing...
...Nunn uses some very subtle cinematic devices to quiet the play down and bring the melancholy romance to the fore...
...Rent it...
...Two scenes are combined into an exquisitely edited expression of the way in which sister and duke and noblewoman pine for one another...
...nature itself is a living, breathing presence...
...But then, Hollywood's illiteracy and disrespect are no worse than the illiteracy and disrespect with which the plays are usually staged these days...
...The duke yearns for the noblewoman...
...He enlists her as a surrogate suitor in his desperate pursuit of a lovely local noblewoman...
...By making clear the consequences of this practical joke, Nunn brings out Shakespeare's most awe-inspiring quality—his ability to present an almost infinitely shaded series of perspectives...
...She is disturbed by her servant's flirta-tiousness, and seeks her cousin's counsel...
...His Lady Jane was stiff and stagey, like most movies made by men of the theater...
...Imagine how effective it would be for A Midsummer Night's Dream's Bottom to morph into a creature with a donkey's head instead of simply having a Halloween-style costume placed on his noggin...
...The other, Trevor Nunn's Twelfth Night, is a glorious piece of work, and one that brings to mind a heretical question: Is it perhaps the case that the cinema is the ideal medium for Shakespeare...
...What of Moliere...
...That is why they usually turn into rotten movies...
...They cut and rearrange scenes, set them in a place Shakespeare never intended and in a time centuries after his death...
...The cousin says the butler has gone mad and locks him up in a pig sty outside...
...Ian McKellen's Richard III, Orson Welles's Macbeth, and Paul Scofield's King Lear are all unforgettable...
...There are a few good performances in the newly released Romeo and Juliet as well—Pete Postlethwaite's Friar Laurence and Miriam Margoyles's Nurse—but Baz Luhrmann's clamorous movie is an atrocity...
...These techniques also make it far easier to stomach one of Shakespeare's most annoying devices—the way he advances the plot by having his characters overhear important conversations by happenstance or spy on one another in the most obvious ways...
...the language, the soaring poetry, the music are all Shakespeare's, but the key and meter are the province of the director...
...The noblewoman is in mourning because of the death of her brother...
...She falls in love with the local duke, but he thinks she's just an innocent young boy...
...People say things to the siblings, and they have no idea what is going on...
...To this list we should add the new Twelfth Night...
...Sheridan...
...In the prologue to Henry V, Shakespeare bemoans the shortcomings of the theater as a medium for a play whose settings are as far-flung as England and the Continent...
...An admirable character is sure to do or say something ignoble...
...The sister flees in horror...
...seasons change...
...And only special effects can capture the most imaginative examples of Shakespeare's poetic vision...
...they were conceived and written to be played in a contained space and no manner of cinematic trickery can transform them...
...Naturally, she thinks the brother is the boy she loves...
...Consider: Stage actors tend to strike poses and go back and forth declaiming Shakespeare's poetry in a singsong that barely sounds like English...
...The tiny gestures that film shows so well—an exchange of glances, one hand touching another in secret—are nearly impossible to pull off on stage, where they must be performed broadly so the audience can see them...
...The sister washes up in a hostile country and disguises herself as a boy...
...He thinks the boy has betrayed him...
...The movies are like variations...
...What's more, the movies offer directors an unparalleled opportunity to enhance and clarify the sometimes sketchy relationships between Shakespeare's characters...
...Two new variations have just opened...
...But Twelfth Night is so fluid and well-conceived that Nunn seems to be possessed by the very "muse of fire" Shakespeare sought...
...No, I'm not kidding...
...The transvestite sister yearns for her brother and for the duke...
...A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest are rife with real magic, and magic is never more real than in the movie theater...
...Then her brother arrives...
...Only the noblewoman's omniscient Fool is free from the hunger that ravages the dramatis personae...
...every character is allowed to make his case...
...The brother does not quite understand why this woman he has just met is so wild for him, but he accepts her marriage proposal anyway...
...he is his sister's spitting image...
...The curtain falls...
...devious creeps like Polonius and demonic villains like Iago speak the most basic truths...
...In all these ways, Shakespeare was made for the movies...
...The movies are made for the effortless transmission of character and detail through cross-cutting and close-ups...
...There are the four movies Laurence Olivier made: Henry V, Hamlet, Richard III, and Othello...
...They trick the insufferable butler into believing that the noblewoman returns his love...
...A shipwreck separates an inseparable brother and sister...
...Imogen Stubbs (Nunn's wife) is enchanting as the cross-dressing sister...
...He entreats his audience to engage their "imaginary forces" and somehow bring themselves to see the horses, kings, and million men at arms he wishes he could place before them...
...Nunn's casting is flawless...
...only by degrees are they able to throw off the shackles of their drunken depression and find the high good humor that eludes them as dawn begins to stream through the windows...
...And when he calls for a "muse of fire" to bring to three-dimensional life the scenes that had to remain stage-bound in his own time, he almost sounds like he had a movie in mind...
...The melancholy extends even to these roustabouts, who engage in the kind of vicious practical joking that characterizes Shakespeare's comedies...
...It takes them about 20 minutes to figure it all out, and those 20 minutes are so frustrating you feel as though you're going to have an anxiety attack...
...But a theatrical audience has to wonder: If it can see such gestures and glances, how do they escape the notice of characters who are standing right there on the stage...
...Despite dozens of attempts, only one good movie has come from a Chekhov play (Vanya on 42nd Street), only one from Shaw (Pygmalion...
...Each thinks the other is dead...
...Finally, everybody pairs off...
...By the time he is let out, the butler is a broken man whose grief, rage, and shame cast a pall over the joyous conclusion...
...The noblewoman meets the brother...
...Shakespeare's other plays span continents, cities, forests, godforsaken islands, the heavens, and the earth...
...The nighttime revels of the comic sidekicks move back and forth between a dreary kitchen and a musty living room...
...Twelfth Night is usually played as a knockabout farce, but Nunn has been struck with a brilliant insight—that Twelfth Night is actually a play about yearning...
...A wonderfully gloomy Ben Kingsley presides over the production as the Fool, whose deep understanding of the human condition pleases him not a whit...
...She immediately falls in love with the transvestite sister and proposes marriage...
...The climax of Macbeth features a bizarre supernatural occurrence—a forest advancing like an army on Mac-beth's castle—that could only be realized on film...
...It is only the second notable movie from Trevor Nunn, whose work with the Royal Shakespeare Company established him as the foremost interpreter of the Bard in our time...
...But on film characters really can hide out of sight in a closet, or behind a hedge...
...Most plays, most great plays, do limit themselves...
...Truth to tell, Twelfth Night can really set your teeth on edge...
...Congreve...
...Just because film is the ideal medium for Shakespeare doesn't mean the plays won't be subjected to all the breathless illiteracy and disrespect Hollywood can muster...
...Not to mention two other Hamlets, one with Nicol Williamson and another with Mel Gibson...
...Years pass...
...The lovelorn duke is furious...
...He may not so openly plead for a muse of fire, but the greatest of all writers simply could not limit himself to the physical confines of the stage...
...Her maid longs for the love of the noblewoman's drunken cousin, who longs for the maid as well...
...Now, before you convict me as a philistine corrupted by our cultural wasteland, let me call Shakespeare as a witness...
...One of them, an MTV-inspired Romeo and Juliet, is a calamity...
...These moments always play awkwardly on stage—if you can see actors hiding, it's difficult to believe that the characters standing three feet away can't...
...Nigel Hawthorne, so masterful in The Madness of King George, is heartbreaking as the silly butler...
...What follows is a scene during which the brother exits and the sister enters, and the sister exits and the brother enters, and everybody thinks they're the same person...
...The butler longs for the noblewoman, as does her permanent houseguest...
...Every Shakespeare character gets his say...
...they can walk down a corridor as an important conversation comes wafting to them in an echo...
...The noblewoman yearns for her dead brother and for the cross-dressing sister she thinks is a boy...
...By contrast, the intimacy of film allows actors to speak in conversational tones, which makes the poetry more comprehensible and far more beautiful...
...He calls the stage "this unworthy scaffold," even insults it: "Can this cockpit hold the vasty fields of France...
...And then there is Kenneth Branagh's Henry V, one of the very greatest movies ever made...
Vol. 2 • November 1996 • No. 10
