[In the following excerpted review of Trevor Nunn's 1979 production of Macbeth recorded on video, Rothwell praises the haunting performances of Ian McKellen as Macbeth and Judi Dench as Lady Macbeth, as well as Nunn's skilled direction.]

The critically acclaimed Trevor Nunn Macbeth (1979), re-recorded on VHS for HBO, returns theater to primal ritual. Macbeth is Shakespeare's journey into the heart of darkness, which probes into the nether regions of the unconscious where shameful desires lie hidden like the damned frozen in ice at the center of Dante's Inferno. Macbeth (Ian McKellen) and his Lady (Judi Dench) wring the last drop of misery out of the nightmare human condition in which there is no hope but only remorse and eventual extinction (“Out, out brief candle! / Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player …”).

Nunn shatters all dogma about the inadequacies of television by brilliantly transforming the original 1976 stage production at Stratford's experimental The Other Place theater into scintillating video drama. This is no simple-minded aiming of cameras at a cluster of talking heads but a creative and shrewd orchestration of camera and action. From an opening overhead shot of the actors arranged in a small Druidic circle, the camera then plays endless variations on the interplay between and among the actors and even the audience. Staging and costume are minimalist to the extreme, Judi Dench as Lady Macbeth, for example, being garbed in a tent-like garment with a black skull cap cloth on her head. When a still confident Lady Macbeth snatches the daggers away from her quailing husband (“Infirm of purpose! / Give me the daggers.”), no barrier intervenes between the Macbeths' anguish and the audience's own anxieties. The intruding and intrusive camera often moves in tight and almost embeds itself in the principal's bodies, as when a writhing Ian McKellen and Judi Dench make a fetish out of virtually melting into each others' flesh.

At the disastrous dinner party, when Banquo's ghost impudently appears, the rhythm of the editing acts as a metronome timing the emotional escalation of host and hostess as Lady Macbeth suffers unspeakable humiliation from her husband's weird behavior. Ian McDiarmid as the Porter with the thickest of country dialects turns in a spectacular performance when he appears in braces over a bare chest to answer the knocking at the gate, and then doubles as Ross. Not to be overlooked, either, is the straightforward way that Nunn identifies Seyton (Greg Hicks), Macbeth's loyal retainer, as the mysterious Third Murderer. This is not just Shakespeare at his best but video at its best. Not to be missed.