Free Macbeth by William Shakespeare

Florence, in March 1847, it was revised by Verdi in 1865 for the Paris Opéra, with an added ballet sequence. This is the version generally performed today.
    As well as the Ukrainian adaptation discussed by Makaryk, there have been productions across Europe, including a Croatian-language version in 1997 directed by Henryk Baranowski. Welcome Msomi’s South African adaptation
uMabatha
, based on the life of the great Zulu warrior Chaka, was staged at the Globe Theatre in 1997. In 1995, the Australian director Simon Woods produced an experimental bilingual English/Japanese version at the Zen Zen Zo theater in Kyoto. The great Japanese director Yukio Ninagawa has created two distinct productions (one in 1980, the other in 2001, both frequently revived), with Samurai allusions fitting to Macbeth’s military demeanor, and a design based around a cherry tree, its falling blossoms representative of that transience and mortality to which Macbeth alludes in his speech about the turning leaf. At the climax,cherry blossoms were seen on the branches of Birnam Wood hewn and borne by Malcolm’s army.

    3. Laurence Olivier as Macbeth and Vivien Leigh as Lady Macbeth, directed by Glen Byam Shaw, Stratford-upon-Avon 1955, after the murder on a quasi-realistic stage set characteristic of the period.
    There have been numerous film versions, including Orson Welles’s idiosyncratic 1948 movie which, unlike his stage production, was set in Scotland. Welles cut approximately half the text and gave theplay a religious focus, even inventing a new character, the “Holy Father.” Welles himself played Macbeth. Ken Hughes’s black-and-white film
Joe Macbeth
(1955) sets the play in New York’s gangland with simplified dialogue and plot. Cinematography invokes a film noir style, playing with light and shadow, high and low angles.
    Roman Polanski’s 1971 film with the young Jon Finch and Francesca Annis as the Macbeths was shot in bright technicolor, with much gore, especially in the scene where Macduff’s family are slaughtered in their home. It did not go unremarked that Polanski had begun work on the film shortly after his heavily pregnant wife, the actress Sharon Tate, together with three of her friends, was brutally murdered by followers of Charles Manson. The film, financed by Hugh Hefner’s Playboy company, was also controversial for Lady Macbeth’s nudity in her sleepwalking scene and for its ending, which lacks textual warrant, wherein Donalbain goes to the weyard sisters, as if to initiate a further cycle of ambition and violence.
    Akiro Kurosawa’s film adaptation
Throne of Blood
(1957), a translation of the plot and setting into Samurai culture, shot in expressionistic black and white, is generally acclaimed as a classic of Japanese cinema. It has been highly influential on western cinema from the
Seven Samurai
remake (
The Magnificent Seven
) onward. A number of stage productions have been filmed, including Trevor Nunn’s acclaimed 1971 production for the RSC at The Other Place with Judi Dench and Ian McKellen, and Gregory Doran’s at the Swan with Antony Sher and Harriet Walter.
AT THE RSC
Stones Have Been Known to Move and Trees to Speak
    Images of blood and darkness dominate the language of Shakespeare’s shortest and most exciting tragedy. Fair is foul and foul is fair—from the instant we are plunged into the Scottish play there is a sense of stagnancy, of something rotting and eating away at all the natural and pure things of this world. Witches, vile murder, ghosts, apparitions, and nightmares punctuate the action of the protagonist’s story. Is it any surprise that this play has been the inspirationfor so much Gothic and horror fiction, and that Roman Polanski’s film version is listed in publications and websites that deal with the greatest British horror films of the twentieth century?
    Despite the play’s historical background and its obvious references to the political world of the time, it is the psychological