I love Ian, but I have never respected him less. "Hamlet wishes his wife died later, and emphasizes it thusly" is all that was conveyed here and the only insight expressed in so many words was that "just doing it sad wouldn't be enough, you need to understand how it is being emphasized otherwise it becomes nonsense pronounced randomly." Maybe this passes for eldritch wisdom among actors; But the fact that words have emphatic, performative, plot relevant meaning, and aren't thrown about at random in a play isn't secret knowledge. And although Ian is an excellent actor, the performance of drawing out such a simple explanation of something so obvious for so long is more impressive than the actual performance was. An incredible shame that anyone was ever convinced this needed saying, this regardless of how much that fact was true or false.
How young he was! I can't imagine that in a few years we will lose the VERY FEW intelligent, cultivated, civilised performers who are still alive. Greetings from Paris.🎉❤
john finch was the best macbeth film star of the 70s mckellen full of hot air john barton master stage director does no his actors alan howard great shakespeare actor plays it to the helt
Why can't we have classes like this? Reading shakespeare and just reading it... What's the use? If we have phenomenal actors, directors, critics, writers, professors with profound sense of understanding and above all the quality of being able to impart that knowledge on others, only then is education complete. What's the meaning of getting a 10/10 when after years of studying Macbeth this is the first time most of us meet such a word by word explanation of the speech? It's sad but atleast better late than never. This clips, surely, is one of the many blessings of the internet ❤
His and Judy Dench’s version of _Macbeth_ is the best one I have seen. I wish I had had this clip in my repertoire when I was teaching Shakespeare before retirement.
Here McBeth is summing up his entire world view. It’s the only place in the English language where a man sums up his entire philosophy of his life in one paragraph.
".. That was great David.. but now I want you to imagine that you're an ice-cream seller who has lost all passion for his cornets.. Then we'll move on to Hamlet on roller-skates.."
So much indulgent over analysis for something that is made so obvious by the words. It isn't the actor that makes the text its the playwright.. all the audience knows that for goodness sake! Modern day actors and directors, suffused with half-cocked notions from Freud and the rest of the rolling pageant of psychobabble have become utterly obsessed with novelty takes.
Agreed, I personally prefer my Shakespeare read by a text-to-speech program. Immersive acting practice, and even emotional inflection of the voice, are utterly useless as I already know it's an emotional play! And furthermore why did Maurizio Pollini practice so much for the Beethoven sonata?? We already know it's a good piece. He could have played more literally.
What a in-depth analysis, You missed a point in “walking shadow” ; “shadow” can be broken into two parts shad and ow and ow emphasizes the pain of macbeth in like how he says OW, it also shows how depressed he is in how he can’t anymore get women to like him like lady macbeth did.
