Shakespeare Retold

The Taming of the Shrew/Midsummer Night’s Dream/Macbeth/Much Ado About Nothing

I love Shakespeare and I love BBC TV series. This popped up on my Netflix Recommendation list probably for those two reasons. I’d give this a huge A-plus, even though only 50 percent of the offerings are good. Scratch that…the two that are good (Macbeth and Taming of the Shrew) are GREAT. The other two are suckfests.

Macbeth

Take a murder-thriller-tragedy set in a dank Scottish castle and transfer it to a haute cuisine restaurant. Turn the three soothsaying witches into three trash-talking, prognosticating garbage collectors. Take a power-hungry, murderous couple driven mad by guilt, greed and power lust and cast James MacAvoy and Keely Hawes as a married couple living in the restaurant that they run (she’s the manager/host and he’s the talented head chef undercut by the poseur, marquee-name chef owner). MacAvoy has the frenetic energy and swagger to pull this off , and Hawes (who is usually prissy and off-putting) makes her version of Lady Macbeth come to life using a creepy/tragic episode in her past brought to the surface by her part in a (series of) grisly murder(s). The two of them and their freefall into bloody madness are not the only good thing about this. The aforementioned scary-comic trash collectors, the stalwart, loyal kitchen staff…all are very effective. The sterile-looking kitchen setting shows off all the blood (real and imagined) very effectively, sometimes looking strikingly a surgical theater or even a morgue. It’s really good, and it stayed with me for days. One Bad Thing: No subtitle option. This is acted using heavy Scottish accents, heavy on the slang. I lost a lot of the dialogue.

Taming of the Shrew

There are a few Shakespeare plays I just don’t like. This is on that list. Misogyny and wife beating are hard to make into comedy. This play (the original) has genuinely funny dialog and lots of drunken revelry, which is always reliably funny. But it cannot really save itself from the fact that its broad (distasteful) social comment cannot translate well to a contemporary audience.Except here, in the Shakespeare Retold version, where it comes off almost miraculously well.

Katherine is a total bitch. Her little sister Bianca is the object of everyone’s affection – sweet, kind, beautiful, compliant. Boisterous, impulsive Petruchio needs to marry well, and on a bet, settles for Katherine, deciding he will tame her. Shakespeare Retold turns Katherine into a ball-busting candidate for Leader of the Opposition party (something like running for Senate here in America).

Screw it. You know what? I can’t teach you Shakespeare. Just go with the flow and understand that Kate and Petruchio are hilarious together. Aside from the fact that she is about 4’11” and he’s gotta be 6 feet plus, making every physical scene they are in absurd, this works because neither of the main characters pulls any punches at all. She screams and spits and flips off every third person she meets. He’s completely, maddeningly, confidently crazy – but also unfailingly honest. Which leads to him getting married in drag, throwing Kate’s luggage in the pool, hiding her cell phone and letting her change a flat all by herself in the middle of the Italian countryside. Despite all this, Kate genuinely loves him … enough to reign in her vituperative tongue and just be loved by this sincere madman. You can’t blame her. He’s completely darling and looks bafflingly attractive in drag.

The secondary characters get (and deserve) the short shrift. Who fecking cares, really, about insipid Bianca and cardboard Lucentio when Kate and Petruchio are screaming insults at each other in an elevator? Not I. Even Shakespeare’s hard-to-swallow ending about submitting to one’s husband has been given a playful edge, making it more of a mutual-respect thing rather than a Marabel Morgan/Phyllis Shlafly-fest. I loved this. Loved it. I wonder how my guy would look in eye makeup and heels…

PS: No subtitles. So I had to watch it a few times to get all the slangy, Britishy dialogue. I would have watched it with the sound off, though, because Petruchio is a mad hot slut.

Much Ado About Nothing

One half of the romances in this comedy are good. The other half is so forced and overwrought that it drains all the good out of it entirely. Beatrice and Benedik (played by The Forsyte Saga’s Damien Lewis) are sparring news co-anchors and former (embittered) sweethearts. The other characters are lame. When B&B are on the screen, they really are captivating. But then there is a costume party and a creepy stalker and insipid lovers and it all goes to hell muy rapido and becomes muy stupido. Much ado about crappy. The End.

Midsummer Night’s Dream

The Worst Shakespeare Play Ever. I hate the whole stupid premise and the forced, hijinx-y enchanted magic-y lameosity. The Shakespeare Retold version is just as bad. I mean, I guess it is. I fell asleep about 4 minutes into it.