If you’re like me, you’ve been spending the past few months missing going out to see plays and performance in Seattle’s theatre scene. As the days get warmer and brighter and summer seems just around the corner, we still don’t know whether we will be able to enjoy Shakespeare in the Park season as we have in past years. Of course nothing can make up for the experience of seeing the Bard performed live, but there ARE some excellent shorts, feature films, and recorded theatre productions based on Shakespeare’s work available on Kanopy. Here are just a few to get you started:
Macbeth, directed by Robert Goold
Starring Sir Patrick Stewart and Kate Fleetwood as Macbeth and Lady M, this film from 2003 sets the action onto a contemporary, vaguely “central European” backdrop with stylistic nods to Soviet propaganda artwork. It is also shot on location in an underground English abbey, giving us a very intense, intimate experience as viewers. The movie is based on a hugely successful play production from Chichester Festival Theatre which originally performed both the UK and on Broadway. For me, the best thing about it are the excellent performances of some of Shakespeare’s most iconic characters.
Hamlet, from The Wooster Group
This is not your average movie version of Hamlet. Rather, it’s a filmed production in which a company of actors attempts to re-construct a live theatre version of the play based on pieces taken from a movie version of said production from 1964. Confused? Me too, until I started watching. This show is a delightfully pretentious multi-media exploration of themes of perspective, surveillance, and fragmentation as viewers experience Hamlet’s story through multiple decades, camera angles, and color gradients. It’s definitely an interesting take on a play that some might say has already been done to death in other forms.
Private Romeo, directed by Alan Brown
This film from 2011 is an adaptation of Shakespeare’s most famous love story, set in an all-boys military school. When eight cadets are left behind all alone in boarding school, the story they are learning about in class makes its way into real life. Except with some important changes – in this love story, the star-crossed lovers are both boys. The film makes some other liberal changes to the classic text, rearranging Shakespeare’s verse a little bit and, as per the movie’s description on Kanopy, incorporating “YouTube videos and lip synched indie rock music.” If you like adaptations that riff on the classics and LGBT+ Shakespeare content, then, this one’s for you!
Dear Mr. Shakespeare: Blackness, Race, and Immigration in Othello by Flourishing Films
This contemporary interpretation by filmmakers Phoebe Boswell, Rienkje Attoh, and Shola Amoo is performed in spoken word style. A 2017 Sundance selection, this work packs an incredible amount of artistry, commentary, and audio/visual poetry into just 6 minutes. Not only is it beautiful to watch and listen to, but it will leave you thinking about racial representation and the impacts of racialized characters in classic theatre works as they are performed and re-performed in different political contexts that change – and in some ways, stay exactly the same – over the centuries.
Happy watching, and here’s hoping that we’ll all be able to watch some theatre in person and outdoors come summertime!
~Posted by Hannah P.
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