Well acquainted with life-altering misfortune himself, director Roman Polanski's The Tragedy of Macbeth makes a point of rubbing its audience's nose in all of the upsetting bloodshed that would otherwise, in a more traditional telling, be occurring off-stage. We are compelled to gaze at bodies - women and children - bloody and bent at uncanny angles, the film offering up a blunt human horror that is evocative of crime scene photography. Jon Finch - a former reservist for British special forces and a Hammer Films veteran - plays Shakespeare's title character, at least initially, with a mod insouciance. His is a much younger Macbeth, a newly elevated lord who has quickly ascertained that he can beat a path to Scotland's throne with increasingly daring acts of violence. Egged on by his equally grasping wife, played by Francesca Annis, Macbeth finds himself in his monarch's bed chamber, his fingers clasped around a dirk.
The murder of Nicholas Selby's King Duncan then is portrayed as the outcome of an acute kind of mania: an intense and hypnotic greed has bewitched Macbeth, urging him to act as fulcrum for the predestined bloodshed that has been sung to him by hags. He stabs his naked king as if in a trance, his body acting on auto-pilot. The guilt that Macbeth then struggles to come to terms with, for this murder and the many that follow, manifests in Polanski's film not so much as explicitly supernatural occurrences, rather as figments of an imagination fired by brain lacerating trauma. The ghost of a former friend, Martin Shaw's Banquo, who appears only to Macbeth in a room crowded with feasters, is readily organised within this filthy, miserable telling as the hallucinatory experience of a man suffering through a psychotic break - this subconscious strata explicitly accessed within the piece by the decision to transform Shakespeare's soliloquies into a whispered internal monologue.
While Lady Macbeth slips away into a stupor - Annis, naked with her eyes locked on the audience that compelled her to commit these acts - the new king does eventually come to terms with himself as a kind of mythic entity that cannot easily be vanquished. Another visit to the Weyward Sisters convinces Macbeth he is living inside a riddle that indicates an apparent invincibility. Armoured battles with the opposing underlings who arrive to end his reign are therefore short and brutal; Macbeth believing himself to be unbeatable and Finch doing an excellent job of portraying exactly that. With respect to the real-life tragedies experienced by Polanski immediately prior to the filming of The Tragedy of Macbeth, Terence Bayler's Macduff would seem to take on a more personal dimension, since Macduff's wife and children have been slaughtered on the orders of a madman. This information is relayed to him as he stands before a massing army; his would-be monarch pleading with the sobbing father to get a hold of himself.
The moment is both public and tinged with shame then, as if the devastated Macduff should, for the benefit of all assembled, take the news on the chin and just instantly accept that everybody he loves is now no more. There's a sense then, come a finale in which Macbeth's bleeding body claws at its neck for a head that no longer resides atop it, that the onscreen Macduff is delivering a coup de grâce that Polanski himself never could: striking Charles Manson's head from his shoulders before a crowd of solemn well-wishers. This reading though elides the fact that, in his relentless pursuit of success, this strangely charismatic Macbeth has, like Macduff, come up short in his obligations to his family. Macbeth, by this point, has abandoned an uncooperative wife to a gaggle of doctors and failed to be present when her life has then hung in the balance. Macbeth and Macduff are therefore united in a shared damnation for their absence. So, rather than transpose our feelings for this pre-sexual assault case Polanski (who, it's worth noting, co-wrote this adaptation with theatre critic Kenneth Tynan) onto any one specific side of these onscreen combatants, perhaps these battling, equally matched husbands could be assessed as warring aspects within a grieving widower. Shakespeare's four hundred year old play then having been reinterpreted as autobiographical psychodrama.
