The 1983 BBC Scottish Play. Much that’s wrong. Much that’s interesting.

September 27, 2017

nichol

Nicol Williamson is often the subject of sentences whose predicate is “… one of the greatest actors of his generation.” And you sort of know that you’re watching someone great in this production. You’re just not sure that you’re watching him in the right format. Or from the right chair.

I for one would have liked to have seen this Nicol Williamson Scottish King live on the Olivier Stage of the National Theatre. Perhaps sitting somewhere near the back. He is prone, particularly in the first half of the play, to whiplash-inducing 180 degree sudden head turns. Double takes like his were not meant to be enjoyed in extreme close up. His staginess is more gestural than vocal and at times he strains audibility. Indeed, sometimes I would have liked him to have been more consistently and theatrically loud so as to match the bigness of his limb waving.

As a performance,Williamson’s Scottish King becomes increasingly inventive though. He finds a new way of separating the two “tomorrows” of his most famous speech, so that his bitter statement of existential despair occurs more suddenly. The wry smile that accompanies his Act V fatalism gets the audience ‘on side’ in disquieting ways.

Jack Gold was a very fine television drama director, but it seems as though he never quite figured out where to place the camera so as to accommodate Nicol Williamson on a small screen. For much of the first half of the play, we somehow feel that we’re uncomfortably close to him, almost as though we’re cramping his style – this is indeed going to be his style.

Jane Lapotaire meanwhile is remarkable. Her Mrs Scottish King is never more sexy than when she’s talking about being “unsexed”. She throws herself backwards onto a big bed and starts to wriggle. When she talks of her “female breast” she actually starts to fondle herself and she concludes the speech in a series of orgasmic groans. At which point her husband walks in with an understandably puzzled look on his face.

Indeed, this performance is almost more erotically charged than her Cleopatra in the same BBC series. Hers is a sexuality that seems to have been denied anything resembling “natural” outlets and is going to express itself in bizarre and unexpected ways.

James Bolam offers a loud cameo as the porter. He speaks with an unaccustomed cockney accent here – but then no actors are allowed to speak with their own accents here – not even the Scottish ones. His porter is so loud and unhappy that it barely functions as any kind of comic relief at the play’s tensest moment.

Tony Doyle’s Macduff resembles a great big teddy bear. When he creases up on learning of his family’s slaughter, you realise that you’re looking at someone who is beyond dignity – for whom self-fashioning is a distant memory and a hopeless prospect. When goaded by the odious Malcolm (Malcolm is odious isn’t he – what is it with that endless “I’m the real bastard” testing scene in Act IV?) to immediately act and take revenge, Doyle’s little eyes squint from his woolly face as though to say “why can’t the whole world just go away?”

The music is by Carl Davis and very striking and obtrusive it is too. Indeed Carl Davis displaces the regular series theme music, presumably because he’s Carl Davis don’t you know. Drums and trumpets also punctuate much of the first half of the play so as to make the jagged “double-take” acting look even less subtle than it is.

Scotland is rendered as a barren grey volcanic looking wasteland so unappealing you wonder why anybody is disputing its sovereignty. The palace seems to resemble Coventry Cathedral – if Coventry Cathedral had been stripped of all decoration in preparation for an unusually long Lent.

When the Scottish play goes wrong – it notoriously goes hilariously wrong and this production manages to avoid some obvious pitfalls while creating some brand new pitfalls all of its own. The notorious “What – in our house!” line is managed by Jane Lapotaire in a way as to sound plausible and the reaction to Daddy’s slaughter “Oh – by whom?” is elongated to the point where the callous implication of casual curiosity is erased.

Its eschewing of filmic special effects is admirably sustained for the most part. Banquo’s ghost is not visible to the audience and Nicol Williamson points incredulously at an empty chair. Nor are the witches’ prophecies displayed otherwise than as modifications of Williamson’s quivering face.

But on the whole, this a is a production that never quite finds its range and never quite knows what it is. Whatever else it is, it’s a great wake to provoke useful technical arguments about how best to translate stage theatre to an all too small screen.

But I’ve written about some other 1978-1985 BBC Shakespeares. For example…

Much Ado About Nothing: