Othello!
Not the Fishburne one, which I haven’t seen, but the Sir Lawrence Olivier one, with Derek Jacobi. I’ve been listening to it over my shoulder all morning.
I have as part of my regular desk reference a decent Shakespeare, everyne should. So much of our language and idiom is due to it, after all. It is, for me, like nails on a chalkboard for reading. I just can’t do it. but to see it? to hear it done, and done well? oh, my god. I could do that forever.
Of course, R&J has been way overdone, so that gets on my nerves, but The Merchant of Venice? Brilliant. The Taming of the Shrew? both the Richard Burton verson and the John Cleese version make me glad to be alive. Others, like The Tempest- well, if Shakespeare had had robots, he’d have written it like Forbidden Planet. Titus, with Anthony Hopkins, is wonderful to listen to, not so much to watch.
And Othello, with Olivier’s beautiful voice and acting chops, and a very young Maggie Smith… What a way to start a lazy midwinter’s saturday.
Seen Ian McKellan as Richard III yet?
oh, lord yes. Innit nice? I wish they had a company that was any good around here that would do all the plays. I’d go to every one.
One of the best things my old English teacher did was make us read Shakespeare in class. After a week of that we had all decided it was awful. He then took us to Spring Green to watch ‘Taming of the Shrew’ and we laughed our collective butts off. The next year we went to see “Comedy of Errors”.
Shakespeare really is meant to be performed, not read.
“Shakespeare really is meant to be performed, not read. ”
Prezactly. It’s a wild ride, to see it done well.
Kenneth Branagh in Henry V and with Emma Thompson in Much Ado about Nothing.
And I try not to publicly fess up to the fact that I get a kick out of the new version of Romeo and Juliet, with Shakespearean language set in the 1990’s. The gas station scene (do you bite your thumb at us, Sir?). And it has Brian Denehey, so all you have to do is tell me he’s in the movie and I’ll sit and watch.
mts1,
“And I try not to publicly fess up to the fact that I get a kick out of the new version of Romeo and Juliet, with Shakespearean language set in the 1990’s.”
I LOVE this version.
Before I got kicked out of grad school and became a burned-out cinder, I was a theatre person with a penchant for watching films of Shakespeare’s plays. If anybody ever asked what movies did the best job of translating the plays from the stage to the screen, I routinely gave them two: Cleese’s Shrew with the Royal Shakespeare Company, and Orson Welles’ Othello. Between them, finer examples could not be found.
Though I’d kill to see a full version of Welles’ “Voodoo Macbeth“…