Off-Modern Hybridity in TV Theatre: Theatrical, Cinematic and Media Temporalities in Rupert Goold’s Macbeth (BBC - Illuminations Media, 2010)

Abstract

Rupert Goold’s screen production of Macbeth – firstly, staged in 2007 and, later, filmed in 2010 – has been studied as an example of the stage-to-screen hybrid corpus of Shakespearean audio-visual adaptations. Thus, much of the critical emphasis on the production has been placed on its filmic qualities. Particularly, the genre film conventions deployed across the film has summoned the attention of Shakespeare on screen scholars and it has been the creators’ intentions to precisely point at Goold’s filmic intertextual repertoire. Given the recent increasing attention to the multiple media and languages employed in stage-to-screen hybrid Shakespearean adaptations and other exchanges between the languages of the stage and film to rework Shakespearean and theatrical productions, it is instructive to observe the ways in which adaptations such as this one engage with larger processes of transmedia storytelling, not only paying attention to theatrical and filmic languages but to the transmedia strategies these TV theatrical films make use of. Importantly, it is instructive to look into the narrative and philosophical purposes served by transmedia storytelling as the multiple media and languages used in the film display a range of temporalities and film genres associated to them that allow us to expand the interpretive range of Shakespeare’s source text. Following this premise, this essay examines Goold’s Macbeth as a nostalgia narrative in which transmedia strategies serve to display a range of media-based narrative strands that expand the film’s range of possible interpretations. To prove this, I will insert Goold’s film in the larger process of transmedia storytelling encompassing the performance history of Macbeth. Additionally, I will identify narrative strands in Goold’s televisual, theatrical, musical, poetic and computer-based sources. The results will show that Macbeth – and, by extension, potentially this applies to TV theatrical adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays – constitutes a strand of the larger corpus of transmedia storytelling wrapping up the Scottish play’s performance history as well as Shakespeare’s overall performance history.