Macbeth On The Estate
1997
A Collection of Article/Review Excerpts

note from webmaster ~ We were very excited to find this interview with Penny Woolcock, who directed this film as press on her has been extremely elusive. Sad to read that this film wasn't her best experience, however, we find it it a great read! We also loved the film.

from BBC Film Network site:

Back Story: Penny Woolcock

Many directors talk nostalgically about childhoods spent playing with Super 8mm cameras. Penny Woolcock is not a case in point. Her interest in screen drama only developed in her mid-30s, but she's since gone on to earn wide acclaim with offbeat films like The Death Of Klinghoffer (2003, for Channel 4), The Principles Of Lust (2004) and Mischief Night (2006). Here she explains how a lucky break in television opened up a world of possibilities.

"Early on it hadn't even occurred to me that filmmaking was a job to do. I didn't really know what directors did until I was way into my mid-30s. I was a painter for a while, although I wasn't very successful so I had to do other jobs where I had to make a living. I went through a period when I was a youth worker - working with deranged teenagers - and I did a play with a group of girls, but they got bored with that so I said to them we'd make a film.

Channel 4 had started not long before that, and that really seemed to open up the possibility of different kinds of people making film. I went to an evening class - a filmmakers' workshop - for one evening. That was the extent of my film school experience! Then I made this film, but I didn't even know you were supposed to get a commission - I just thought I'd make this film and somehow it would get on television. I had a bit of luck when someone from Channel 4 came to this workshop where I borrowed the equipment and asked to see the films that they had produced. He bought the film and showed it on television.

Then I applied for a job in Newcastle directing and editing something called Northern Newsreel, which was a half-hour magazine programme. That was fantastic because I had to direct and edit it myself, which meant that when I messed up and didn't get the right material I was also the one who had to reap the consequences editing it, so that really was the most fantastic training. That's how I learned the nuts and bolts of filmmaking. I then got a commission to do a film, a documentary, called When The Dog Bites. I think that was really my first film. It attracted a bit of attention. I got an RTS award for it and Paul Watson, who was head of Elstree at the time, saw it and asked me to come and work for him."

"I did this film called Macbeth On the Estate for the BBC [1997], which was a very unhappy experience. I adapted the Shakespeare play and shot it very much in a documentary style, which was initially very shocking. I felt very scrutinised and criticised. I remember the people at the BBC were absolutely horrified and said, 'This will never cut!' I was convinced that it would cut. It wasn't an easy experience because they had expected something much more formal. In those days it was still very much that you had to have the master shot and the reverse shot. Shooting something in a different way wasn't a pleasant experience for me, or for them, but people did like the play. It's even used in schools - and kids like it because it's like a gangster movie!"

James Frain in Penny's 1997 TV film Macbeth On The Estate

"Then [five years later] I had an idea to do The Death Of Klinghoffer and I just emailed the head of music and art at Channel 4, and asked her if she'd be interested in making a film based on this opera. She said, 'Aren't you that woman who makes films about criminals on housing estates?' [Tina Goes Shopping and Tina Takes A Break.] Much to my surprise, she called back and said that she was in a meeting that day where everyone was asking, 'What are we going to do about opera? It just doesn't work on television.' It was really good timing. You need two things if you're going to be a filmmaker: you need to persevere and be incredibly tenacious, and then you need a lucky break. Part of that luck is knowing people who are in sympathy with what you're trying to do and who have access to some money! When you've been around a while you build up relationships like that."

"You have to be making films, that's the best way to learn the technical details. Film school is another way, of course, but there are no short cuts. I remember feeling completely out of my depth for a long time, particularly when I was making When The Dog Bites. I read somewhere about tracks and I insisted that I had to have a grip and tracks every day, even though I didn't actually know what they were! I remember when the grip pulled this railway track thing out of the back of the van I thought, 'Oh, so that's what it is.'

"I kept thinking I was going to be caught out so I read this very boring magazine called American Cinematographer - which is absolutely dire - for a few years, in order to try and learn something about lenses. I mean, you do need to know a certain amount yourself, otherwise you're too reliant on the technicians. You need to be able to say what you want but I'm still learning. I would say to people, don't be afraid of all that."

Penny Woolcock on the set of Exodus

"When you're working on feature films, it is a different approach from television because your screenplay is sent off to up to 20 people and you'll have lots of notes from all these people. You have to tread a very fine line between listening to those people who you think might be being helpful and make your film better, and at the same time not let your vision be drowned or diluted. With more money comes more interference."

"I remember watching Alan Clarke's work and thinking I hadn't seen anything like that before, but I don't know if I'm directly influenced by him. Maybe in an unconscious way. There's also a film called The Battle Of Algiers [1966] that I saw years ago and although consciously I wasn't aware that I was following in those footsteps – by using people who aren't actors in films and attempting to create an impression of something more authentic – I'm sure seeing that had a very big effect. There's a scene at the beginning of Klinghoffer which I'm sure must've been very strongly influenced by a scene in The Battle Of Algiers, although I didn't realise it at the time."

Stella Papamichael | Published 28 June 07

from The Evening Post:

SHAKESPEARE'S Macbeth is a council estate drug addict and Duncan a crime baron in an adaptation of the play being made by the BBC. Residents of a run-down Birmingham estate in suburban Ladywood are being recruited for spear carriers and small parts in the 90-minute film.

Swords are replaced by baseball bats and the three witches by street urchins in film-maker Penny Woolcock's version of the Scottish classic. Among professional actors in the leading roles are James Frain, Susan Vidler as Lady Macbeth and Andrew Tiernan as Banquo.

Duncan, dignified Scottish King in Shakespeare's bloody play, is portrayed by Woolcock as the local crime godfather, surviving through drugs and extortion in a world with no laws. Macbeth is the Temazepam-addicted henchman who turns against him on the urgings of his wife. Woolcock said her research on tough council estates spawned the idea. "Nobody has a job . . . The local economy, crime and punishment are all controlled by the hard guys. It all reminded me of Macbeth, where feudal warlords slug it out for territory and power."

Author not available, Macbeth on drugs in slum. , The Evening Post (Wellington, New Zealand), 07-23-1996

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MACBETH ON THE ESTATE

In a unique performance, Shakespeare's tragedy is updated to the present day by documentarymaker Penny Woolcock and set on an inner-city estate. The play, filmed on Birmingham's Ladywood Estate, features 130 local people alongside some of Britain's most promising young actors.

Macbeth is brought to contemporary urban Britain, in a community dominated by drug culture and gang warfare, where order is imposed by violence - baseball bats and bars. The play was a logical progression for the director, who in 1995, collaborated with theatre director Michael Bogdanov in the award-winning documentary Shakespeare on Estate. For that documentary Woolcock filmed Bogdanov as he cajoled residents of the Ladywood estate, who knew little about Shakespeare and cared even less, to act roles from a selection of his play. The idea was a huge success and this full length performance has proved a remarkable progression of the work.

For James Frain, who plays MachMacbethbeth as a crack-addicted thug, the setting is so convincing that, he says, "I can't imagine Macbeth being set anywhere else now. The idea of it having cloaks and beards and people wandering around medieval castles seems incredibly odd. This just seems to work so well".

Director: Penny Woolcock
Production: BBC, 1997

(a cache overview from a Finnish website:
archives_25_spring 1999/macbeth_on_the_estate)

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an excerpt from a review from "The British Theatre Guide":

Macbeth on the Estate

Dateline: 14th April, 1997

Did you see BBC2's Macbeth on the Estate a week gone Saturday (5th April) on BBC2? It was part of the Performance series which showcases new drama.
Eh? Showcases new drama? Shakespeare?
That may sound like a contradiction, but it is true - and appropriately named. So what was different about it?

• It was set, not in Scotland, but on Birmingham's Ladywood estate;
  
• The characters were all members of street gangs, drug dealers and criminals, not Scottish nobility;
  
• The weird sisters became weird children;
  
• Although most of the principal characters were played by professional actors, over a hundred local people from the estate took part, some in speaking roles;
  
• The director was a documentary film-maker, not a theatre or even a TV drama director;
  
• The play was cut to an hour and twenty minutes in length.
  

According to the Radio Times, the director, Penny Woolcock, said that she had very little interest in Shakespeare. I hate the theatre. Most of it is completely irrelevant. But in "Shakespeare on the Estate" people got very excited, and suddenly you heard his words coming alive. Those speeches are wonderful and they mean something. So it wasn't just the people of Ladywood who became interested in Shakespeare, it was me as well.

Poor lady! She's suddenly realised what she has been missing!
But is this conversion to Shakespeare (both Woolcock's and the people of Ladywood's) really any justification for the radical - almost root and branch - chopping up of one of the major tragedies of world theatre?

Richard Stayton, in an acerbic and polemical article entitled Whose Shakespeare?, has this to say about this kind of approach:
The hip, with it, chic, cool thing to do with Shakespeare is to make his work ACCESSIBLE... not by speaking the lines clearly, or elucidating a plot simply, or addressing profound philosophical discourse in a conversational style. We make Shakespeare accessible by costuming him in today's fashions, or making him a screenwriter obedient to a director's fantasies.

Evidently the fear among us is that Shakespeare may not be relevant. So theaters feel compelled to make his work relevant. There is in today's theater world what I call THE SHAKESPEARE INDUSTRY. It has sprung from academia, where cultural historians, English professors and inexperienced theorists conspire to write original theses exhuming the true meaning behind the writings of the man from Stratford. Papers roll. Documents flow. Conferences are held. Opinions are spoken. There is Hamlet's Oedipus Complex and Cleopatra's Edifice Envy. There is post-modernism, pre-structuralism, multiculturalism and deconstructivism. There is the politically correct and there is the politically incorrect and there is the politically indifferent.

Where, oh where, in all this contorted analysis, is the Shakespeare who first touched our hearts and minds?
Where indeed?
As always, the truth, I think, is somewhere in between. We can justify a "different" or "radical" approach if it illuminates or throws fresh light upon the play, or if it provides a powerful theatrical experience. I remember vividly my first ever experience of Shakespeare in modern dress. It was a National Youth Theatre production of Julius Caesar, back in the late sixties, and it portrayed Caesar's "party" as being totalitarian - in fact, Nazi - and Brutus, Cassius and co. as being the democrats. It made a great impression on me, and I still feel that there was justification for this approach....

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James Frain on his part in "Macbeth On The Estate"

Probably his most difficult television role was the lead in Macbeth in 1997, Penny Woolcott's re-setting of the Scottish play on Birmingham's Ladywood Housing estate, which mixed professional actors and local residents. Frain's Macbeth was strung out on prescription drugs and handy with a baseball bat.

"It was an amazing experience and I was very grateful for it, but it was really tough," he discloses. "We really didn't have enough time. We had ten days' rehearsal and a four-week shoot. If you were doing Macbeth on the fringe, you'd get at least three or four weeks to rehearse. I remember two things from that shoot. One was the extraordinary people I was working with. The other is the pressure of not having enough time and the stress of that." Was he pleased with the result? "I thought it was a really original thing. I wasn't crazy about me in it."

Spying a possible route into Frain's emotional life I asked him if he often feels that way about his work? Way ahead of me, he bursts out laughing. "You got me! I just let one through, didn't I?" Composing himself, he takes a sip of his tea and nods. " I admit it. Yes, I do feel that very often. I am rarely satisfied with what I've done. But most actors would say that. You see it and you want to do it again, because you always learn something from watching what you've done." After the initial viewing, he never watches his films again. "Once is enough," he insists.

excerpt from article be Clive King - Who's That Boy? - The Times (June 1999)

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IMDB link for Macbeth On The Estate

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