LADY MACBETH : FILMMAKER WILLIAM OLDROYD TAKES ON ONE OF SHAKESPEARE’S DARKEST CHARACTERS

We are experiencing a copious cinematic cascade of crinoline and corsets led by the currently screening My Cousin Rachel and A Quiet Passion. The latest entry, LADY MACBETH is, quite simply, lady magnificent, trumping the current crop with performance, power and precision.

William Oldroyd’s beguiling film begins with a wedding. In a beautifully framed and composed shot, the focus is on the bride, veiled in virginal white. There is no sign of a groom. The feel is more like a funeral than nuptial celebration.

Later, in a joyless bedroom, the groom appears and orders her to take off her nightie. She dutifully obliges. He has a gander but is not up for goosing, and leaves the chamber with the marriage unconsummated.                  

The bride’s name is Katherine. She has been bought by the groom’s father, a wealthy landholder, to be brood mare for his brooding son. At seventeen, she is twenty years younger than her sperm saving spouse. She is resigned to the duty of her dowry, but not neglect nor the nunnery like existence dictated by her father in law.

With her husband and father in law away, both more interested in their coal mine operation, she takes a servant to her bed, revelling in her lust, savouring her sexuality, subsumed in her exquisite sensuality.

When her sensual sovereignty is threatened, she resorts to deadly resistance in a myriad of murder.

Screenwriter Alice Birch had read the 1865 Russian novella Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk by Nikolai Leskov, and felt that its themes – the subordination of women in society, life in rural communities, and of passionate illicit love – were exciting ones for a film adaptation. She was right.

In her sublime script, Birch imbues shades of Wuthering Heights, Madame Bovary, Lady Chatterley and even a smidgeon of Taming of the Shrew. It is a delicious cocktail – erotic, urgent, errant, erudite and economical.

Birch’s script provides the trenchant base camp from which director William Oldroyd and his cast and crew push toward the peak, carrying it spectacularly to the summit.

Heading up this tragic trajectory is Florence Pugh as Katherine. Pugh’s perfect, complete, pure, impartial performance avoids all temptation to play for sympathy with no implication that she despises the despicable acts her character commits. Her acting alchemy is evident as we sympathise with her. Unsex me here? Not bloody likely! And fill me from the crown to the toe, top full of direst cruelty? Most assuredly!

A sublime supporting cast that includes Cosmo Jarvis, Paul Hilton, Naomi Ackie, and Christopher Fairbank succeed in making this an Everest event.

Australian cinematographer, Ari Wegner, brings a gorgeous eye to the often severe and austere interiors, and exalts in the Northern English exteriors.

This being a bodice ripper, Holly Waddington cossies are bodaciously ripping, a fine fit with the production design of Jacqueline Abrahams.

Instead of a traditional score, two sound designers – one from theatre – help shape the mood of the film. The hugely experienced, and BAFTA-winning, sound mixer Ben Baird works alongside Ivor Novello winning composer Dan Jones to create a very unusual soundscape to reflect Katherine’s fracturing state of mind, so the sounds of the landscape and the buildings become almost like a score in itself.

Fair is foul and foul is fair in this trim, taught and terrific film. ‘Tis so seldom something so wicked this way comes.