Triumph at Dunsinane

When Shakespeare plays television, he usually loses. A line here, a scene there, disappears under the chopper as all that spirit is crammed onto the 21-inch screen. The total effect, too frequently, is bottled bard. But this week NBC's Hallmark Hall of Fame pulled out the cork, took a full setting and two hours for an excellent, virtually uncut production of Macbeth.

Filmed in England and at Scotland's Hermitage Castle in the Cheviot Hills, the play--with its bright Highland backgrounds and darkly cloistered interiors--was done in some of the most living color ever seen on television. It was well directed by George Schaefer, who made restrained but effective use of the advantages of film: for the forest-concealed murder of Banquo; for an electronically superimposed vision of his ghost, whose airy lack of substance helped direct attention away from the supernatural and into Macbeth's mind; for the approach of troops, siege ladders, battering rams, and Birnam wood itself to Dunsinane.

All that would have gone for naught had it not been for the towering performance of Judith Anderson, the fine one of Maurice Evans. With blood-red hair and blood-red voice as she told her shallow-hearted thane to screw his courage to the sticking place, Judith Anderson was so evilly and essentially Lady Macbeth that she seemed to have been waiting there among the Scottish battlements 900 years for NBC to come and shoot her.

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