Exhibition: Shakespeare at the OU

Kiernan Ryan associates Welles’s film with the heightened awareness in post-war 1948 of the dangers of fascism (Clip 12). His analysis in this connection of Welles’s creative use of camera angles is very perceptive; and of course the positioning of the camera is a key facility which is peculiar to screen versions, as distinct from live theatre, where the perspective of each member of the audience is determined by their seat.

View Clip 12

(I am reminded by this aspect of Welles’s film and the analysis we have just heard of a live performance of Macbeth I saw in Nairobi University in 1983. The protagonist of this modern-dress version, entitled Makabeti, was a virtual caricature, and was clearly modelled on the then recently deposed Ugandan dictator, the obese Idi Amin.)