“He has no children”: Changing Representations of the Child in Stage and Film Productions ofMacbethfrom Polanski to Kurzel

Abstract

Justin Kurzel's 2015 film of Macbeth takes the multi-faceted trope of childhood in Shakespeare's play and turns it into a visual image that permeates the landscape of his film. From the pre-credit sequence, in which the grieving Macbeths are seen burning the body of their dead baby on a funeral pyre, to the closing coda, in which young Fleance returns like an avenging fury to challenge the crown, they provide a crucial interpretative framework for reading this latest cinematic adaptation. It is an interpretation, moreover, that presents the child as a complex and contradictory nexus of hopes, fears and anxieties. Not merely innocent victims, the children of Kurzel's Macbeth are both pitiful and terrifying. This portrayal of childhood has its roots in a tradition beginning in the last three decades of the twentieth century, when directors focused increasingly on the children in this play. In this paper, I will begin with the last major English-language film of Macbeth by Roman Polanski (1971) and track the dramatic treatment of the children through to Kurzel's 2015 release, locating the shift in focus within a larger socio-historical context of changing attitudes towards the role and identity of children more generally. By focusing on some landmark English theatre productions staged in the period between the two films, I will demonstrate a general trend away from a sentimentalised depiction of childhood towards a nihilistic vision that heralds the end of the so-called "century of the child".

Flipping Macbeth: PTSD, gender, and generation in adaptations by Wolfert, Kurzel, and De Man

“…As Gemma Miller puts it, '[w]hile Lady Macbeth is haunted by memories of her dead baby, Macbeth is tortured by memories of warfare, made manifest in the figure of a ghostly boy soldier'. 20 Still, the gender difference suggested by that phrasing is only partially applicable: Macbeth, too, is shown grieving for his son and envious of other people's children. Besides, during the opening battle, his trauma is compounded by the death of a young soldier who he sees as a substitute son.…”