Macbeth by Daylight

On one side, England's historic Bamburgh Castle loomed up on a craggy promontory above the North Sea. On the other, hundreds of movie extras, dressed as medieval soldiers, crouched behind uprooted spruce and pine trees. Suddenly, groaning and clanking, huge siege catapults hurled fireballs through the air toward the castle. The climactic battle scene in a new film version of Shakespeare's Macbeth was under way. As black smoke billowed into the sky, the extras threw down their camouflage and charged the spiky fortifications with a battering ram and scaling ladders. Exciting stuff? "These epic scenes bore me to death," said Director Roman Polanski. "The real stuff is in the studio, where you can get into your characters."

As interpreted by Polanski and his fellow adapter, Critic Kenneth Tynan, those characters are a radical departure from tradition. "Usually," says Polanski, "Macbeth is played as an unpleasant bearded chap, Lady Macbeth as a nagging bitch--and both are middle-aged." By contrast, Polanski has given the roles to attractive young unknowns: Jon Finch, 28, and Francesca Annis, 25. The idea is to make them more sympathetic, and to make her power over him more plausible by stressing its sexual basis. Argues Tynan: "This way it's a more fascinating personal story of an ambitious couple, very much in love, in some ways rather vulnerable and pathetic, who believe in an exciting prophecy and make the mistake of taking short cuts to achieve it."

Bad-Luck Play. The macabre and violent streaks in Macbeth--ghosts, witches, murders, beheadings--seem ready made for Polanski, whose previous films include Rosemary's Baby and Repulsion. But he is trying to avoid the gloomy, selfconsciously tragic mood that he says pervades most stage productions. "One reason this is known among actors as a bad-luck play," he maintains, "is that it's done in the dark, and people are always falling off parapets and breaking their ribs." Polanski is bringing it into the daylight. His witches are not spirits, but real, scruffy women. His actors, wearing no makeup, speak the Shakespearean verse conversationally. Authenticity is Polanski's byword; he uses it to mean 'not so much chronological accuracy as "a look that can make people believe all this actually happened."

To achieve authenticity, he spent six weeks tramping over bleak vistas in Wales and northern England. The cast, fortified by daily rations of vitamin C, slogged through gales, rain, freezing temperatures and even hailstones. Polanski, 37, whose appearance suggests a Polish leprechaun, bounded all over his set, doing a little of everybody's job--digging up a rock, moving a prop, holding a horse. His eye for detail is such that he would interrupt a sword fight sequence to adjust the fold of a cloak, or, if a natural rainstorm did not seem convincing enough, supplement it by hosing the actors with water. Far from complaining, the youthful cast seemed caught up in his energy. When Jon Finch was not starring as Macbeth, he would hop on a horse and ride in the background as an extra.

Nude Walk. What is missing from the production is the lurid, sensational aura widely expected. Since it is being financed by Hugh Hefner's Playboy Productions and since Tynan devised Oh! Calcutta!, this, the supposition goes, must be a nude Macbeth. Actually, the only extended nude sequence planned so far is the sleepwalking scene. "And that will be nude," explains Tynan, "for the simple and realistic reason that in the Middle Ages they hadn't heard about nightdresses."

Polanski's notoriety, although vicarious, is even greater than Hefner's or Tynan's. "Before tragedy came into my life," he says, "I had a reasonably good reputation as a director. Now my main claim to fame seems to be as the husband of the murdered Sharon Tate. It's ridiculous, but because of the association, there's a feeling that whatever I come up with here will be quite grotesque." Not only are some segments of the press and public working up a froth of anticipation over the expected nudity and kinky sex; another camp is already writing letters to editors, calling for all lovers of Shakespeare to unite in boycotting the film. "Both groups," insists Polanski, "will be disappointed."

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