And now for something completely different

[swan_tower]

I could talk about how the Bay Area is officially going under a “shelter in place” order for the next three weeks, and the surreal sight of my local grocery store completely denuded of flour, rice, chicken, and other staples . . . but you know what? My brain is desperate for other material right now.

So! Please recommend to me what you consider to be the best recorded performances of each of Shakespeare’s plays. I do mean each: not just the ones that have been done a bunch of times, like Hamlet or Romeo and Juliet, but anything for which Shakespeare’s authorship is moderately certain. Cymbeline? The Winter’s Tale? Movies, TV miniseries, filmed stage performances, any of those are fine, but not adaptations that use the plot without the script (e.g. 10 Things I Hate About You).

This question brought to you by me thinking, hmmmm, I’ve written some Shakespeare fanfic for Yuletide — I wonder if I could sell some short stories in that vein? I need grist for the mill, basically.

(And feel free to pass the link to this post along to anybody who might have recommendations.)

Comments

[green_knight]

I do not know whether it is available - I saw the DVD in the shop but could not afford it at the time - but if you ever get your hands on _Merry Wives the Musical_ (RSC, with Judy Dench), you're in for a treat. I saw it on stage and adored it; it felt very irreverent and very Shakespearean, and the audience was bawdy and very much into it.

[swan_tower]

Good to know! Especially since that's definitely one in the "less often performed" camp.

[pameladean]

I cannot possibly cite the best. But these are intriguing, satisfying, fascinating.

Trevor Nunn's 1996 movie of "Twelfth Night." Helena Bonham Carter plays Olivia, Ben Kingsley Feste, Imogen Stubbs Viola, Nicholas Farrell an AMAZING Antonio.

Michael Almereyda's 2000 movie of "Hamlet" with Ethan Hawke as Hamlet.

There's a movie of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" in which Saul Williams plays Oberon, which we watched not expecting much except for Saul Williams to be extraordinary, which he was, but while it was cut much too heavily it had some lovely moments. Peter Quince was gender-swapped and played very well. It's a modernish setting where the rude mechanicals are film students.

P.

[sovay]

Nicholas Farrell an AMAZING Antonio.

This is true.

[swan_tower]

"Best" mostly in the sense of "please help me narrow down the field from what Wikipedia tells me exists." :-)

Thanks for the recs! I remember my feeling on the 2000 Hamlet was frustration that they didn't do more: what they were doing was good, ergo I wanted them not to be cutting bunches of text that would have worked beautifully with the bits they kept. But my introduction to Hamlet was Branagh's epic version, so all others invariably feel to me like they've cut way too much.

[pameladean]

I hate it when they cut Hamlet. My brain just goes on to recite whatever I know of what's next and then gets mad if it can't remember.

That's a FABULOUS introduction to the play. I love that movie. Mine was a 1970's Hallmark Hall of Fame production starring Richard Chamberlain as Hamlet. It was set in an 18th-century manor house and severely cut, but Chamberlain was splendid and it had a really good Horatio.

P.

[swan_tower]

I was lucky -- Branagh's Hamlet came out right when we were about to study it in school. So I had an excellent and not truncated version of it to absorb in performance, which always (for me) makes reading it work so much better.

[sovay]

Please recommend to me what you consider to be the best recorded performances of each of Shakespeare’s plays. I do mean each: not just the ones that have been done a bunch of times, like Hamlet or Romeo and Juliet, but anything for which Shakespeare’s authorship is moderately certain.

Off the top of my head—

I kind of imprinted on Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet (1968). I've never really written about it, but with the exception of a frustratingly miscast Richard E. Grant, I consider Trevor Nunn's Twelfth Night (1996) near-definitive. I adore Grigori Kozintsev's Hamlet (Гамлет, 1964), all of it; I have never even slightly written about Michael Almereyda's Hamlet (2000), but it impressed me once I finally saw it. My favorite Tempest is Derek Jarman's from 1979. My favorite Julius Caesar is Joseph L. Mankiewicz's from 1953. I don't have a favorite Midsummer Night's Dream because I've never seen a production I would consider definitive, but the 1935 film is worth seeing just for James Cagney. My favorite Titus Andronicus is Julie Taymor's 1999 Titus. Most of the rest of Shakespeare I have not seen in recorded form or would not consider the recordings better than the live stagings. My favorite Measure for Measure, for example, involved spatch and a hand puppet and I don't think anyone even taped it on their phone.

[edit] As is the case with many stories that are reperformed, I have a lot of versions where I really like one or two things from them, but would not necessarily say YES THIS IS THE ONE. I can still list those if you're interested.

[swan_tower]

Thank you! See above re: my thoughts on Almereyda's Hamlet.

I feel the way about Macbeth that you do about A Midsummer Night's Dream. Though I've been meaning to try the one Teller helped out on -- he wrote some cool blog posts about it, that made it sound like it might finally be the one I click with.

Most of the rest of Shakespeare I have not seen in recorded form or would not consider the recordings better than the live stagings.

I will accept "not the best, but available recorded." The play I can watch is better than the play I cannot watch. :-) And while I do of course have the option of reading them, I get more out of Shakespeare in action than on the page.

My favorite Measure for Measure, for example, involved spatch and a hand puppet and I don't think anyone even taped it on their phone.

. . . I don't suppose he could be bribed into a repeat performance? :-)

[sovay]

See above re: my thoughts on Almereyda's Hamlet.

Understood. Liev Schreiber may still be the best Laertes I've seen on film.

Though I've been meaning to try the one Teller helped out on -- he wrote some cool blog posts about it, that made it sound like it might finally be the one I click with.

I like the taped version of the 1979 RSC Macbeth directed by Trevor Nunn, starring Ian McKellen and Judi Dench; it's black-box claustrophobic in a way that onstage I might have found nauseatingly immersive but at the remove of video I mostly found conceptually neat, but its cast is superb.

The ART a couple of years ago staged a Tempest with stage magic by Teller and songs from the catalogue of Tom Waits. I was not impressed with its Miranda, who was much too one-note tremulous for my tastes, but their Caliban was a pair of conjoined tumblers, Trinculo a charming scene-stealer, and the corners of the stage haunted by raven-headed spirits who attended on Prospero and assisted him with his magic. They did the masque as a levitation. Their Ariel was splendid. The illusions never ground the action to a halt; the magic was always in service of the story, sometimes small and offhand (Ariel always has a pack of cards about him; he does uncanny things with it, generally as if he doesn't notice) and sometimes sudden and frightening (Ariel as the harpy at the feast is replaced in an instant by his master Prospero without so much as a furl of the magician's cape to camouflage it) and never the trick you were expecting. spatch liked their awkward Ferdinand better than I did—he was endeared by the actor's trick of reciting his longer, more formal speeches like royal courtesies he had memorized by rote as a child, softening into naturalism only in less stately, more intimate dialogue—but there was an astonishing dumbshow of his drowning at the beginning of the play as Alonso craning from the stricken ship tries to reach his son first with his hands, then with his crown thrown out like a lifeline; Ferdinand catches hold of it, but Ariel bears him away into the deeps and holds his head down far longer in real water than it seems anyone should survive onstage with no camera to cut away. Washed up on shore, Ferdinand is still clutching the crown, as hard and unconsciously as a child in a nightmare. And I liked their Prospero, who banked a showman's flair about a hard core of old anger, stage-commanding and still not all-knowing. When Ariel says, "Mine would, sir, were I human," it gives Prospero a visible start: he has forgotten that about Ariel. He remembers the airy spirit in the cloven pine, but he has grown so used to the Pierrot-pale assistant in his checkered trousers and his sleeveless vest, he's stopped thinking of him as a guise. But of course he is: any human flesh would be. None of the shapes in which we see Ariel are his own. (When he's freed, he vanishes, without word or gesture, empty air as Prospero turns around; that is how I like that unbinding to be played.) And his nonhumanness came and went, which I found very effective. He moves gracefully but not eerily; his freedom is a perfectly comprehensible desire, but then something in the way he says ordinary things rings strangely. He never sounds less human than when he asks the most mortal question of all: "Do you love me, master?" and answers it himself, before Prospero can speak, "No." There is no regret in it, no hurt, no yearning. We hear the curiosity, but we don't know what he was hoping to learn. Perhaps he just wanted to know what it felt like to say the words. Everyone else around him seems to think they're important.

I will accept "not the best, but available recorded." The play I can watch is better than the play I cannot watch.

Trevor Nunn directed an Othello in 1990 starring Willard White, Ian McKellen, Imogen Stubbs, and Zoë Wanamaker, with an American Civil War conceit, and I hesitate to call it my favorite, but it was agonizing, so I think that means it worked. My favorite Iago actually came from a local production in 2010. I've never seen that take on the character before or since.

Michael Elliott directed a 1983 TV King Lear with Laurence Olivier in a stony, misty British Iron Age setting; I admired but did not love it except for John Hurt's Fool, thin, dark, quick, nervous, shape-changing, which was exactly what I wanted from that character and had not previously seen.

I really do like Kenneth Branagh's 1993 Much Ado About Nothing with the exception of Michael Keaton, who is in a different production from everyone else, and Keanu Reeves, who existentially should have been Alan Rickman.

. . . I don't suppose he could be bribed into a repeat performance?

I am afraid it was part of a larger production! I'll ask in case I'm wrong about the footage.

[starlady]

+1 on the RSC Macbeth with McKellen and Dench. They're both powerhouses and the staging works. Last I checked it was purchaseable on DVD.

[swan_tower]

their Caliban was a pair of conjoined tumblers

I'm curious: you most likely mean a pair of tumblers who were, for the purposes of the play, conjoined, but do you actually mean a pair of conjoined people who were tumblers?

My favorite Iago was also from a local production, in Dallas, years ago. It was my introduction to the play, so there might be a certain amount of "I had nothing to compare it against at the time," but I remember very much liking the way the actor (who bore a faint resemblance to Kevin Bacon) delivered some of his lines toward the audience, with this ironical air of letting us all in on a bitter joke nobody around him was getting.

Keanu Reeves, who existentially should have been Alan Rickman.

. . . you know, I weirdly am okay with Reeves there -- but having read this line, yes, you are exactly right. And Keaton always bothered me there.

(I may have said this to you before, but I figured out a while ago that the reason I like Keanu Reeves as an actor better than I feel I should is because I like actors who perform with their whole body rather than just their faces and maybe hands, and that's a thing he does. Which helps counterbalance the shortcomings of his acting from the neck up.)

[sovay]

I'm curious: you most likely mean a pair of tumblers who were, for the purposes of the play, conjoined, but do you actually mean a pair of conjoined people who were tumblers?

I do not mean the latter, although that would also have been really neat. Caliban was two actors who used one another's bodies to form evocative and physically impressive shapes but never separated for a second; they were also accustomed to trade off lines of dialogue, although sometimes they spoke ("You taught me language; and my profit on't / Is, I know how to curse") in unison. I suspect they were doing hand-to-hand acrobatics, but I really don't know enough circus terminology to describe it beyond that. I liked it as an interpretation; usually Ariel is the shape-changer. I have a stupidly vivid memory of a bit of business where one of them was oriented butt-first toward Prospero while the other made fart noises with his mouth.

but I remember very much liking the way the actor (who bore a faint resemblance to Kevin Bacon) delivered some of his lines toward the audience, with this ironical air of letting us all in on a bitter joke nobody around him was getting.

That does sound effective.

(I may have said this to you before, but I figured out a while ago that the reason I like Keanu Reeves as an actor better than I feel I should is because I like actors who perform with their whole body rather than just their faces and maybe hands, and that's a thing he does. Which helps counterbalance the shortcomings of his acting from the neck up.)

I don't believe you had said this to me before and I agree with you about his physicality. I don't actually think there's anything wrong with liking Reeves as an actor! I just think he was miscast on a near-metaphysical level in Much Ado About Nothing.

[pameladean]

Oh, yes, that Julius Caesar is gorgeous. Everything just so, very precise.

P.

[tablesaw]

I recently was researching Troilus and Cressida, so I can tell you that pretty much the only filmed performance I could find was part of the BBC Television Shakespeare series. I watched it on Kanopy for free with my library card; I think most of the series is available there, and they have some of the less-staged plays.

I really adored the music in the 1998 Lincoln Center production of Twelfth Night, and it's apparently at the Internet Archive and holy shit I forgot Paul Rudd was in it.

[swan_tower]

I actually worked on a production of Troilus and Cressida, and theoretically have a recording of it around here somewhere. I imagine the BBC TV one is . . . rather different, starting with the fact that its setting will not be "post-apocalyptic rave."

Thanks for the mention of Kanopy! I hadn't thought to consider that.

[benbenberi]

I once saw Ralph Fiennes do an amazing, powerful Coriolanus on stage. I can't vouch for the filmed version, but if it's anything like the stage one it's the must-see movie of that play.

[swan_tower]

I can't vouch for the comparison, but I remember finding the filmed one very good!

[laurashapiro]

The National Theatre's Twelfth Night with Tamsin Greig was the best production of Shakespeare of any kind I've ever seen. We saw it via NTLive so the recording exists, but as far as I know you can't get it unless you're a school or some other kind of teaching institution. We lobbied our library to get NTLive's recordings and they said there wouldn't be sufficient interest. ):

[swan_tower]

I can look into this!

[laurashapiro]

Rumors are afoot that the NT is going to put their whole collection online as a response to COVID-19!

[carbonel]

Julie Taymor's production of The Tempest has Helen Mirren as Prospera rather than Prospero, and it's a fascinating and utterly gorgeous production. Having the "wise person" character being both female and a mother puts an entirely different spin on things. Only a few pronouns were shifted, but the feel is quite different. I know the movie got mixed reviews, but I thought it was great. And since it's Julie Taymore, the costumes and sets are amazing. I think it's the only recorded production that I've seen of the play, so I can't make any judgment as to "best." Oh, and the commentary track was well worth listening to.

I second pameladean's recommendation of the Michael Almereyda version starring Ethan Hawke Hamlet. Several years ago, I watched every version of that play that was available at Netflix, and while I love the Branagh version, the Almereyda one was a fresh new take without any real change to the script.

[swan_tower]

I sometimes think that one of the measures of quality in a piece of art is how flexibly it can be adapted -- how many different takes you can find on the same fundamental material. This is true with songs, when you can cover them in wildly different musical styles; with plays, you can have both the Almereyda Hamlet that freshens it up, and the Branagh Hamlet that doesn't but gives you a feeling for the whole work, without truncation.

[bookblather]

I love the Branagh Much Ado. It's fabulously done and I like Keanu Reeves as Don John. More importantly, Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson are an amazing Beatrice and Benedick.

I haven't seen all of it, but what I have seen is Extremely Good Things in the David Tennant and Catherine Tate version, too.

[swan_tower]

<fist-bump of liking Keanu Reeves as Don John> He . . . just works for me somehow! In part because of what I said to Sovay above, re: him acting with his whole body. I mean, I don't disagree with her that existentially he should have been played by Alan Rickman, but I don't have a significant problem with what we got. And yes, best Beatrice and Benedick ever, y/y?

[ashnistrike]

It is my understanding that a recording of the recent Globe travelling production of Merchant of Venice is available. It is perfectly done, and shattering.

-Nameseeker

[swan_tower]

Good to know! Since that's one that is incredibly hard to do well.

[sovay]

It is perfectly done, and shattering.

Oh, good. Augh.