The Scottish Play
2021: Keith Boynton

This film is built around a production of Macbeth in a small Massachusetts town. The ghost (apparently) of William Shakespeare shows up with some rewrites he wants to have incorporated in the play. He explains these first to Sydney, the woman engaged to play Lady Macbeth, and then to the director. They are at this point in a quandary about whether to follow the traditional text of the play, or the new version.

The premise is silly, though it implicitly entails some more serious questions. Silly or not, however, the follow-through more than redeems the setup. The acting is quite good, and the cinematography is elegant and assured, though never ostentatious. Most impressively, though, the diction of the newly crafted lines is far better than the norm for Shakespeare parody, and it’s played with some style. In the process, the film actually explores — far more thoughtfully than one might well expect — some of the textures and concepts of Macbeth; I would even go so far as to say that it does so with more finesse than many scholarly articles. Whether one takes the suggested changes to the text as improvements or not, the conceit is intriguing and the execution superior. It’s an oddly fine piece of work, and worth revisiting. It also contains a few fragmentary bits of the original Macbeth performed to near-perfection.

Buy The Scottish Play streaming from Amazon.