The Tragedy of Macbeth (Polanski) (1971) (15)

SCREENING AS PART OF FROM PAGE TO SCREEN FILM FESTIVAL

Tickets: Adult £12 | Cons & U25’s £10

Fuelled by ambition and prophecy, a Scottish lord named Macbeth becomes king of Scotland. However, his quest to gain and maintain power unleashes a cycle of violence. Roman Polanski sought the help of his friend to write the screenplay, the theatre critic Kenneth Tynan, who was interested in working with Polanski because the director demonstrated what Tynan considered “exactly the right combination of fantasy and violence”. Controversial when it was first released, partly because of the casting of two young actors, Jon Finch and Francesca Annis as Lord and Lady Macbeth  to make the film more relatable to the youth culture of the 1960s/70s and partly because of the level of violence and nudity. Later, the film was re-evaluated. The director John Sayles praised the film saying ‘it’s a great piece of film making’ with the critic Roger Ebert awarding it 4 stars and writing ‘‘it is full of sound and fury’.

After the screening Francesca Annis will be in conversation with Rebecca Lenkiewicz, whose play Shoreditch Madonna she starred in 2005. 

DIRECTOR | Roman Polanski
STARS | Jon Finch, Francesca Annis and Martin Shaw
SOURCE TEXT | The Tragedy of Macbeth by William Shakespeare
SCREENWRITER | Roman Polanski and Kenneth Tynan

This film is sponsored by

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