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10. Macbeth (1971)
directed by Roman Polanski
There's a disturbing link to off-screen reality when Shakespeare's bloody and murderous Macbeth is directed by a man whose wife was slaughtered by a quasi-spiritual cult not two years prior to filming.Roman Polanski's rendering of "the Scottish play" is as gruesome, repulsive and drearily perverse as you might expect, stripping the well-known tale of any comforting familiarity by setting it in a cold and mud-smeared Scotland that's primal and horrifying as a nightmare. Little of Shakespeare's text remains intact: this is a brutal, nasty treatment of the story that won't dress up evil in eloquent speeches or heroic battle sequences. While I won't recommend it for everyone—there's nudity and barbarism aplenty—I will defend it as an important and legitimate piece of work. Better this than the all-too-common strategy of bad artists and false prophets, making evil look good, and good evil.
Content: Rated R. Extremely violent. Nudity is limited to the witches, who are anything but sexually alluring.

Ron Reed is founder and managing artistic director of Vancouver's Pacific Theatre. Ron says he started Pacific in 1984 so he could act in any play he wanted, and he's ended up a playwright as well.

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Related Elsewhere:

Postmodern Hamlet	Printer view
Can Shakespeare survive the dissolution of the self?

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The Faith of Shakespeare	Printer view
Awe and reconciliation in the work of WS.