a AES EE tee EEA apie ee Re TR " Other Arts & Review the Other Press March 6, 1992 Isn't Macbeth a Tragedy Toronto’s Hardee T. Lineham and Vancouver's Patti Allan star in The Vancouver Playhouse production of MACBETH. How is this play possible? If youhaven’tseen Macbeth at the Playhouse, go. And while you watch one of Shakespeare’s great dramas unfold, be aware of what you feel for the central char- acter, Macbeth. In fact, you may even want to ask yourself, how is this play possible, are all Scottish kings merely bloodthirsty, what is the nature of tragedy? Macbeth The Vancouver Playhouse Feb 14 to March 27 reviewed by Stephen So The Playhouse presents splendid pyrotechnics in an effort to enhance the show: pods of fire, trap doors, sounds of war, clouds of mist, ghostly apparitions, and plenty of blood. Doesitall help? Perhaps. I thinkithelpsif whatyouarebring- ing to the stage is a conscious effortat competition for the atten- tion of T.V. and movie viewer's. But this is a show written for the stage, and there are no technical interventions which will alter this reality. So that, finally, the pyrotechnics become a dis- traction from the real drama; the tragedy of Macbeth. Hardee T. Lineham givesa fine performance as Macbeth, a tremendously complex character, whose struggle with the moral peril and utter doom which cir- cumstances have presented him, is rendered with many poignant moments. Yetwhathappens forsome of the audience when they wit- ness the scene in which the muti- lated corpse of the murdered Banquotappears before Macbeth? They laugh. Wherethe Bard would have us witness a man stepping by fits and starts into a kind of madness, of which he is unquestionably aware and yet unable to control, thescene becomes, forsomeview- ers, a kind of comic relief, the glowing blood under black lights a stage variation of Beetlejuice, or some such equivalent. In other words, there are distractions. What is most disparaging about the production is the cli- macticdual between Macbethand McDuff. Whatever the audience feels for Macbeth, absolute dis- dain surely isn’t part of that. And yet, at the momentof his dismem- berment what do we hear from theaudience-cheersandapplause. Applause?! In part, one may at- tribute this spontaneous release tothestiff, rather rehearsed sword fight between the two actors, which only works if there is be- lievableintention withevery swing and thrust from the opponents. But that is only part of it. The awareness one feels, that one is watching a stage fight, rather than being engaged in the tension of mortal combat, in addition to all the rest of the production tricks carefully designed to keep our attention, raise serious questions about the possibility of presenting tragedy to audiences in the clos- ing decade of the twentieth cen- tury. Onewonderswhy thePlay- house, after deciding on Macbeth, should then proceed to mask the ambiguities in the play, favouring instead the distractions which have made this production so ex- citing, so good and evil, so black and white? Have they decided that their audience cannot cope with Shakespeare’s Macbeth? Would their audience’s catharsis hurt at the box office? Or, maybe, they just wouldn’t get it anyway. Hearts of Darkness Evident in Apocalypse Now Hearts of Darkness Directed by Fax Bahr with George Zaloom Narrated by Eleanor Coppola Cineplex Odeon Films Reviewed by Haroon A. Khan My filmisnotamovieabout Vietnam, it is Vietnam. It is what it wasreally like. It wascrazy,and the way we made it was very much like the Americans were in Vietnam. We were in the jungle, there were toomany of us, we had access to too much money and too much equipment and little by lit- tle, we went insane. Francis Ford Coppola’scom- ments on his film, A Now, at the Cannes Film Festival in 1979. Very few films can attack an audience where it hurts - at the gut, visceral level. Apocalypse Now does that and more. On nearly every level of sound and vision the film brings the surreal nightmare that was Vietnam to the screen. A throbbing presence that starts with Jim Morrison intoning the End to Marlon Brando’s last words “..the horror.,.the horror”, Apocalypse Now grabs you by the throat and doesn’t let go until after the final credits roll. - A legacy of the film is Hearts of Darkness a documen- tary chronicling the making, and near breaking, of one of the most awesome spectacles that ever made it to the screen. Eleanor Coppola narrates the film, culled from footage she shot during the production of the film. Packed with documentry footage andouttakesfrom the film, including thefamousFrenchPlan- tation scene{a rather lavish se- quence, that was cut out of the ~ film because Coppola was disap- pointed with it) Hearts of Dark- ness is relentlessly absorbing. Originally set for a 16 week shoot, the film mutated into 238 days of sometimes nightmarish filming. . Martin Sheen’s near fatal heart attack on-set and Coppola’s Kurtz in the final reaction “If Marty dies, I want to hear that everything’s okay until I say Marty is dead!” is indicative of the chaos that reigned on set. To add to the strangeness is Marlon Brando, who arrives in the Phillipines bald, overweight and without a clue as to what the filmisabout.(Brandodidn’tbother to read Hearts of Darkness, the Joseph Conrad book upon which Apocalypse Now is loosely based.) There. .is a hillarious se- quence where in mid improvisa- tion Brandogrim- aces and says “I think I just swal- lowed a bug.” Amazingly Brando’s _per- formance as film is mesmeriz- ing. Hearts of Darkness is intercut with modern interview segments with many of the stars of the original film: Martin Sheen, Larry Fishburne, Frederic Forrest, Sam Bottoms, Dennis Hopper, and Coppola himselfshed new insights into the evolution of the film. One holdout thoughis Marlon Brando, who declined being interviewed. However, he did say to co-direc- tor Fax Bahr at a chance encoun- ter: “Listen, I just do my shit and then I go home.” Some of the footage is, like the film itself, disturbingly fright- ening yet eerily beautiful, the ani- mal sacrifice in particular. You have to see it yourself to judge whether or not Coppola’s vision was worth the effort expended to fullfill it.