Shakespeare Retold
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Bill Paterson, Imelda Staunton, James McAvoy, Keeley Hawes, Shirley HendersonBrand: WHV
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown), Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo; English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo
Format: Closed-captioned, Color, DVD, NTSC, Widescreen
Picture Format: Unknown
Running Time: 360 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2007-07-24
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Model: E2890
Studio: BBC Worldwide
Product features:
- The four cutting-edge productions in this collection bring Shakespeare alive for a 21st century audience. Macbeth is the chef in a three-star restaurant, slicing apart his celebrity boss, Duncan. Beatrice and Benedick are rival co-anchors on a nightly newscast whose open hostility masks passion of a different kind. Titania and Bottom carouse together in a tawdry theme resort called Dream Park. And
Movie Reviews of Shakespeare Retold
Movie Review: "Shakespeare RETOLD - Exactly That"
Summary: 5 Stars
This BBC Video of 4 plays stands head and shoulders above numerous of the so-called authentic Shakespearean productions I've had to endure in many years of theatergoing. First of all, it has an integrity forecast in its very title, "Shakespeare Retold." Thus we expect to be and happily are spared those half-baked, clueless productions that set an Elizabethan play with its original language intact, say, in 19th-century Tierra del Fuego, believing that the universal can be achieved through the set and costume designer's contempt for historical particulars.
The plays in this DVD set, on the contrary, have all been reconceived and rewritten as contemporary works, sharing to some extent Shakespeare's stories, but not his plots and only glimmers now and again of his grand language. In their own right, they are undeniably entertaining, if ultimately small scale, melodrama or farce. "Macbeth," hewing most closely to its incomparable predecessor, is in my view the finest of the lot. James McAvoy and Keeley Hawes, as an ambitious, future celebrity chef and his enabling wife, turn in ferocious performances which call to mind the best of film noir. Theirs is great acting in melodrama.
Teachers may find it useful, by the way, to set this version next to Shakespeare's and have students discern the differences between expert melodrama and sublime high tragedy. Many will quickly see that all the blood and gore that grabs their interest in the melodrama is part and parcel of the Shakespearean work, which probes the characters more deeply and extends their actions beyond private life or minor celebrity, thus transcending its melodramatic origins. Many of them will further conclude - and quite rightly - that great tragic art, far from being genteel, is the melodrama they love, plus. Also to its credit, this modern "Macbeth" eschews ethical pioneering of the sort that blemishes the modern "Much Ado," which has a Hero who's in fact slept with some jerky guy "out of sympathy" before her true love Claudio, here called Claude, comes on the scene. This modern Hero in her ethics reminded me of a student I once taught who declared after reading "Othello" that Desdemona HAD slept with Cassio, but that she'd done so before her engagement to Othello, so the Moor had no reason to be upset. Fortunately, the modern "Macbeth" is free of any ethical pandering. The only absurdity it might lead students to is the question of how many children Lady Macbeth had since Shakespeare's heroine admits she has "given suck" and in the modern version the pathetic/villainous wife and her husband are supplied with a kid who died in infancy. But this sort of literal minded question applied to poetic drama is, of course, much more easily disposed of than the ethically confused decisions of the Othello student or her soulmate, the contemporary Hero.
Summary of Shakespeare Retold
Synopsis:Item Type: DVD Movie
Item Rating: NR
Street Date: 07/24/07
Wide Screen: no
Director Cut: no
Special Edition: no
LanguageENGLISH
Foreign Film: no
Subtitlesno
Dubbed: no
Full Frame: no
Re-Release: no
Packaging: Sleeve Please note: This supplier will be closed on 11/24, 11/25, 12/26, 1/2 for the holidays. The shipping cut off is 12/10 to try and have the products delivered by Christmas.
Shakespeare Retold, BBC's four-episode Shakespeare project, is more fulfilling when compared to past filmic adaptations of the maestro's plays, since its experimentation ventures well beyond previous versions of the same stories. In the past, adaptations relied on strict adherence to the original scripts (see Orson Welles' and Polanski's Macbeths, or Franco Zefferelli's lavishly accurate renditions of The Taming of The Shrew and Romeo and Juliet). Though Welles as Macbeth and Liz Taylor as Kate are stiff competition, however, these parts are ever open for reinterpretation. But not until Leonardo di Caprio as Romeo dropped a hit of ecstasy on screen did adaptations stray so far into the narrative experimentation that this series relies on. The stories retold, Much Ado About Nothing, Macbeth, The Taming of the Shrew, and A Midsummer Night's Dream so loosely keep their Shakespearian frameworks that unassuming viewers may miss the link. For example, in Macbeth, Joe (James McAvoy), the ambitious sous chef, kills his restaurant's owner to inherit the kitchen's three Michelin stars. Does this mean now that every movie about murderous jealousy is Shakespeare Retold? In The Taming of the Shrew, conservative politician Kate, valiantly portrayed by Shirley Henderson, is coerced into marriage by her political advisor to win Prime Minister votes. In A Midsummer Night's Dream, Puck (Dean Lennox Kelly) is a hippified nerd who drops onto the camera lens something like liquid acid before spinning a mundane tale of broken engagement. Shakespeare modernized without his language, or original settings, hardly feels like Shakespeare at all. Shakespeare Retold, will undoubtedly please some fans and enrage others. Though Shakespeare professors will relish this new attempt to contemporize Shakespeare, the four films comprising Shakespeare Retold not only diminish the potency of these classic tales, but also beg the viewer to question what Shakespeare tales really are. ?Trinie Dalton
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