Macbeth - A Study Of Power For Our Times

Ambition, tyranny, war and witchcraft are just some of the ideas that Shakespeare dealt with in Macbeth. The South Bank Show looks at how, 400 years after the play was first performed, the ideas it addresses, almost more than any other of Shakespeare’s works, have daily resonance in political and cultural life.

Few of Shakespeare’s plays have inspired so much contemporary drama, using many of Macbeth’s themes of violence, intolerance and terrorism, which are so valid today.

Melvyn Bragg visits Cawdor Castle to set the scene, and establish the ‘Scottish’ play in the Jacobean time in which it was written. How it echoes some of our political landscape today with political power, religious intolerance and terrorism being high on the agenda.

Macbeth is a study in the psychology of ambition, political power struggles and, ultimately, evil tyranny: a seemingly ordinary person, who acquires an insatiable and then murderous appetite for power.

Macbeth has often been used as inspiration for portrayals of the government of the day – Francis Urquhart, the ruthless Conservative politician in Michael Dobbs’ House of Cards. However, Blair’s government must be the most dramatised British government in television history, and Macbeth has regularly been used for reference.

In The Deal one could compare the power struggle of Blair and Brown to that of Macbeth and Duncan; while the portrayal of Cherie Blair is arguably inspired by Lady Macbeth. Dramas like Alistair Beaton’s The Trial of Tony Blair also draw from Macbeth – from Blair being haunted by ghosts from the Iraq War, to a scene in which a guilty Tony Blair scrubs his hands just like Lady Macbeth.

The South Bank Show looks at the characters of the play. How the characters of Lady Macbeth and Macbeth’s three witches have become archetypal figures. The media often use the term “Lady Macbeth” as a label for powerful women e.g. Barbara Amiel, Hillary Clinton, Winnie Mandela and Cherie Blair. Whilst, Jade, Jo and Danielle were dubbed “Macbeth’s witches” by the popular media during the Big Brother furore.

The theme of tyranny in Macbeth has inspired several films and plays based on Macbeth. In recent years writers and commentators have drawn many parallels between Macbeth’s Scotland and Africa today. Giles Foden bore this in mind when writing his novel The Last King of Scotland, and he talks to The South Bank ShoW about why he drew so much from Macbeth when writing his novel about Idi Amin.

Contributors include: the actors Ian McKellen and Simon Russell Beale; Michael Dobbs, Shakespearean academic Jonathan Bates, Kenneth Baker, Helena Kennedy, Giles Foden, Shirley Williams; and foreign correspondent Robert Fisk who sees a great deal of Macbeth in Saddam and his tyrannical regime – not just in terms of his violence but because he was paranoid and superstitious like Macbeth.

Still leading the way, The South Bank Show is the first ITV1 programme to be available on the internet in both podcast (audio) and vodcast (video) format at itv.com/southbank.

Macbeth – A Study Of Power For Our Times
The South Bank Show
Sunday 8 July 2007 at 10.45pm