Macbeth
2009: Colleen Stovall

This looks like something made from a college production of the play. As a performance, it’s not really bad, but it’s far from a professional product. The production values of the video (both the images and the audio) are such that they alienate the viewer fairly systematically from what’s going on. The lighting is glaring and monochromatic, almost all the camera shots are from a distance and from the level of (or below) the stage, and the sound is hollow and muddy. One gets the impression that it was an earnest and well-intentioned production, and it deserves credit in that it runs to slightly over two hours — a more substantial treatment than many professional products. It might well have been more engaging in person, but the mechanics of the video takeup are very alienating. A lot of effort was clearly expended on making the fights plausible; personally I find productions that emphasize the dialogue more to the point.

I bought this because it was available on Amazon; it appears to be a publish-on-demand item done by CreateSpace, which is fine, but it’s definitely an amateur operation, and my sense is that it was really not pretending to be anything more. I am not sure whether it is still available, or whether it was made available chiefly for the sake of allowing the participants to get copies for their own memorabilia. I did not gather anything particular from it that would shed a great deal of light on the play, I’d say.

Buy Macbeth from Amazon.