User:AndyJones/Macbeth

The following moved from Macbeth 24 January 2008:

Film versions

Main article: Macbeth on screen

Macbeth has been adapted to film and television numerous times.

Adaptations

Literary versions

• MacBird, a 1966 counterculture drama by Barbara Garson featuring US President Lyndon B. Johnson as Macbeth
• Macbett — 1972 play by Eugène Ionesco which satirises the original.
• Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, short story by Nikolai Leskov only loosely related to Shakespeare's play
• Light Thickens — 1982 Inspector Alleyn mystery novel by Ngaio Marsh Concerns the five weeks of rehearsal for a London production of the play.
• Macbeth — 1988 Greek novel by Apostolos Doxiadis
• Wyrd Sisters — 1988 novel by Terry Pratchett, whose plot combines those of Macbeth and Hamlet. One of many novels set in the Discworld fantasy world.
• MacBeth — 1999 Finnish comic book, adapted by Petri Hannini and artwork by Petri Hiltunen.
• The Third Witch — 2001 novel by Rebecca Reisert, told from the point of view of one of the witches in the play.
• La señora Macbeth 2004, by Griselda Gambaro. An Argentinian play, told from the point of view of Lady Macbeth and her arguing with the three witches that harass her during the victories and later death of her husband.

Television versions (a selection)

• Macbeth — 1954 Hallmark Hall of Fame live adaptation of the famous stage production starring Maurice Evans and Judith Anderson, with a mostly American supporting cast of stage and television actors, among them Richard Waring.
• Macbeth — 1960 television remake of the 1954 production, again produced for the Hallmark Hall of Fame, and again starring Evans and Anderson, but this time featuring an all-British supporting cast, and filmed on location in England and Scotland. Ian Bannen and Jeremy Brett are also featured.
• Play of The Month: Macbeth; 1970 production, shown on the 20th September that year on BBC1. Starring Eric Porter, Janet Suzman, John Alderton, Geoffrey Palmer, John Thaw and Tony Caunter.
• Macbeth— 1983 production produced for the BBC Shakespeare series shown on PBS, this version starring Nicol Williamson and Jane Lapotaire.
• Macbeth — 1992 animation by Nikolai Serebryakov as a part of Shakespeare: The Animated Tales
• Macbeth — 1998 TV movie on UK Channel 4, starring Sean Pertwee and set in an alternate present-day Scotland, but with the original dialogue
• The BBC's ShakespeaRe-Told series in 2005 included a present-day modern-language Macbeth set in a Glasgow restaurant starring James McAvoy.

Musical adaptations

• The parody opera Macbeth by Paul Wranitzky
• The opera Macbeth (1847) by Giuseppe Verdi
• The opera Macbeth (1910) by Ernest Bloch
• The opera Macbeth (2002) by Salvatore Sciarrino
• Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, an opera by Dmitri Shostakovich based on the short story by Nikolai Leskov
• Macbeth, one of Richard Strauss's earliest tone poems (1890)
• The album Macbeth (1990) by Laibach
• The album Thane to the Throne (2000), a concept album by Jag Panzer
• The album A Tragedy in Steel (2002), a concept album by Rebellion.
• Macbeth: the Contemporary Rock Opera (revised 2006) by Judy Stevens and Clarry Evans, first performed at the Queensland Performing Arts Centre.
• Umbatha, merging the story with the history of Shaka Zulu, incorporating Zulu tribal songs and dances. Written by Welcome Msomi and first performed in 1969. See UCLA news article.
• David Hobson's rock opera - 1985
• From a Jack to a King by Bob Carlton 2007

Following copied from Macbeth 5 September 2010:

Performance history

Shakespeare's day

Apart from the one mentioned in the Forman document, there are no performances known with certainty in Shakespeare's era. Because of its Scottish theme, the play is sometimes said to have been written for, and perhaps debuted for, King James; however, no external evidence supports this hypothesis. The play's brevity and certain aspects of its staging (for instance, the large proportion of night-time scenes and the unusually large number of off-stage sounds) have been taken as suggesting that the text now extant was revised for production indoors, perhaps at the Blackfriars Theatre, which the King's Men acquired in 1608.

Restoration and 18th century

In the Restoration, Sir William Davenant produced a spectacular "operatic" adaptation of Macbeth, "with all the singing and dancing in it" and special effects like "flyings for the witches" (John Downes, Roscius Anglicanus, 1708). Davenant's revision also enhanced the role of Lady Macduff, making her a thematic foil to Lady Macbeth. In an April 19, 1667, entry in his Diary, Samuel Pepys called Davenant's MacBeth "one of the best plays for a stage, and variety of dancing and music, that ever I saw." The Davenant version held the stage until the middle of the next century. The famous Macbeths of the early 18th century, such as James Quin, employed this version.

Charles Macklin, not otherwise recalled as a great Macbeth, is remembered for performances at Covent Garden in 1773 at which riots broke out, related to Macklin's rivalries with Garrick and William Smith. Macklin performed in Scottish dress, reversing an earlier tendency to dress Macbeth as an English brigadier; he also removed Garrick's death speech and further trimmed Lady Macduff's role. The performance received generally respectful reviews, although George Steevens remarked on the inappropriateness of Macklin (then in his eighties) for the role.

After Garrick, the most celebrated Macbeth of the 18th century was John Philip Kemble; he performed the role most famously with his sister, Sarah Siddons, whose Lady Macbeth was widely regarded as unsurpassable. Kemble continued the trends toward realistic costume and to Shakespeare's language that had marked Macklin's production; Walter Scott reports that he experimented continually with the Scottish dress of the play. Response to Kemble's interpretation was divided; however, Siddons was unanimously praised. Her performance of the "sleepwalking" scene in the fifth act was especially noted; Leigh Hunt called it "sublime." The Kemble-Siddons performances were the first widely influential productions in which Lady Macbeth's villainy was presented as deeper and more powerful than Macbeth's. It was also the first in which Banquo's ghost did not appear on stage.

Kemble's Macbeth struck some critics as too mannered and polite for Shakespeare's text. His successor as the leading actor of London, Edmund Kean, was more often criticised for emotional excess, particularly in the fifth act. Kean's Macbeth was not universally admired; William Hazlitt, for instance, complained that Kean's Macbeth was too like his Richard III. As he did in other roles, Kean exploited his athleticism as a key component of Macbeth's mental collapse. He reversed Kemble's emphasis on Macbeth as noble, instead presenting him as a ruthless politician who collapses under the weight of guilt and fear. Kean, however, did nothing to halt the trend toward extravagance in scene and costume.

Nineteenth century

The Macbeth of the next predominant London actor, William Charles Macready, provoked responses at least as mixed as those given Kean. Macready debuted in the role in 1820 at Covent Garden. As Hazlitt noted, Macready's reading of the character was purely psychological; the witches lost all supernatural power, and Macbeth's downfall arose purely from the conflicts in Macbeth's character. Macready's most famous Lady Macbeth was Helena Faucit, who debuted dismally in the role while still in her mid-20s, but who later achieved acclaim in the role for an interpretation that, unlike Siddons', given contemporary notions of female decorum. After Macready "retired" to America, he continued to perform in the role; in 1849, he was involved in a rivalry with American actor Edwin Forrest, whose partisans hissed Macready at Astor Place, leading to what is commonly called the Astor Place Riot.

The two most prominent Macbeths of mid-century, Samuel Phelps and Charles Kean, were both received with critical ambivalence and popular success. Both are famous less for their interpretation of character than for certain aspects of staging. At Sadler's Wells Theatre, Phelps brought back nearly all of Shakespeare's original text. He brought back the first half of the Porter scene, which had been ignored by directors since Davenant; the second remained cut because of its ribaldry. He abandoned the added music, and reduced the witches to their role in the folio. Just as significantly, he returned to the folio treatment of Macbeth's death. Not all of these decisions succeeded in the Victorian context, and Phelps experimented with various combinations of Shakespeare and Davenant in his more than a dozen productions between 1844 and 1861. His most successful Lady Macbeth was Isabella Glyn, whose commanding presence reminded some critics of Siddons.

The outstanding feature of Kean's productions at the Princess's Theatre after 1850 was their accuracy of costume. Kean achieved his greatest success in modern melodrama, and he was widely viewed as not prepossessing enough for the greatest Elizabethan roles. Audiences did not mind, however; one 1853 production ran for twenty weeks. Presumably part of the draw was Kean's famous attention to historical accuracy; in his productions, as Allardyce Nicoll notes, "even the botany was historically correct."

Henry Irving's first attempt at the role, at the Lyceum Theatre, London in 1875, was a failure. Under the production of Sidney Frances Bateman, and starring alongside Kate Josephine Bateman, Irving may have been affected by the recent death of his manager Hezekiah Linthicum Bateman. Although the production lasted eighty performances, his Macbeth was judged inferior to his Hamlet. His next essay, opposite Ellen Terry at the Lyceum in 1888, fared better, playing for 150 performances. At the urging of Herman Klein, Irving engaged Arthur Sullivan to write a suite of incidental music for the piece. Friends such as Bram Stoker defended his "psychological" reading, based on the supposition that Macbeth had dreamed of killing Duncan before the start of the play. His detractors, among them Henry James, deplored his arbitrary word changes ("would have" for "should have" in the speech at Lady Macbeth's death) and his "neurasthenic" and "finicky" approach to the character.

Twentieth century to present

AJ Comments:

• Section too long overall
• Don't like the sources we have got towards the end
• Recentism
• Some things get far too little weight (Polanski not mentioned but Hugh Hefner is!!!)
• Needs a separate section on film.

Barry Vincent Jackson staged an influential modern-dress production with the Birmingham Repertory in 1928; the production reached London, playing at the Royal Court Theatre. It received mixed reviews; Eric Maturin was judged an inadequate Macbeth, though Mary Merrall's vampish Lady was reviewed favourably. Though The Times judged it a "miserable failure," the production did much to overturn the tendency to scenic and antiquarian excess that had peaked with Charles Kean.

Among the most publicised productions of the 20th century was mounted by the Federal Theater Project at the Lafayette Theatre in Harlem from 14 April to 20 June 1936. Orson Welles, in his first stage production, directed Jack Carter and Edna Thomas, with Canada Lee playing Banquo, in an all African American production. It became known as the Voodoo Macbeth, because Welles set the play in post-colonial Haiti. His direction emphasised spectacle and suspense: his dozens of "African" drums recalled Davenant's chorus of witches. Welles later directed and played the starring role in a 1948 film adaption of the play.

Laurence Olivier played Malcolm in the 1929 production and Macbeth in 1937 at the Old Vic Theatre in a production that saw the Vic's artistic director Lilian Baylis pass away the night before it opened. Olivier's makeup was so thick and stylised for that production that Vivien Leigh was quoted as saying "You hear Macbeth's first line, then Larry's makeup comes on, then Banquo comes on, then Larry comes on". Olivier later starred in what is among the most famous 20th-century productions, by Glen Byam Shaw at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1955. Vivien Leigh played Lady Macbeth. The supporting cast, which Harold Hobson denigrated, included many actors who went on to successful Shakespearean careers: Ian Holm played Donalbain, Keith Michell was Macduff, and Patrick Wymark the Porter. Olivier was the key to success. The intensity of his performance, particularly in the conversation with the murderers and in confronting Banquo's ghost, seemed to many reviewers to recall Edmund Kean. Plans for a film version faltered after the box-office failure of Olivier's Richard III. Kenneth Tynan asserted flatly of this performance that "no one has ever succeeded as Macbeth"—until Olivier.

Olivier's co-star in his 1937 Old Vic Theatre production, Judith Anderson, had an equally triumphant association with the play. She played Lady Macbeth on Broadway opposite Maurice Evans in a production directed by Margaret Webster that ran for 131 performances in 1941, the longest run of the play in Broadway history. Anderson and Evans performed the play on television twice, in 1954 and 1962, with Maurice Evans winning an Emmy Award the 1962 production and Anderson winning the award for both presentations. A film adaptation in 1971 titled The Tragedy of Macbeth was executive produced by Hugh Hefner.

A Japanese film adaptation, Throne of Blood (Kumonosu jô, 1957), features Toshirô Mifune in the lead role and is set in feudal Japan. It was well-received and, despite having almost none of the play's script, critic Harold Bloom called it "the most successful film version of Macbeth."

One of the most notable 20th-century productions is that of Trevor Nunn for the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1976. Nunn had directed Nicol Williamson and Helen Mirren in the play two years earlier, but that production had largely failed to impress. In 1976, Nunn produced the play with a minimalist set at The Other Place; this small, nearly round stage focused attention on the psychological dynamics of the characters. Both Ian McKellen in the title role and Judi Dench as Lady Macbeth received exceptionally favourable reviews. Dench won the 1977 SWET Best Actress award for her performance and in 2004, members of the RSC voted her performance the greatest by an actress in the history of the company.

Nunn's production transferred to London in 1977 and was later filmed for television. It was to overshadow Peter Hall's 1978 production with Albert Finney as Macbeth and Dorothy Tutin as Lady Macbeth. But the most infamous recent Macbeth was staged at the Old Vic in 1980. Peter O'Toole and Frances Tomelty took the leads in a production (by Bryan Forbes) that was publicly disowned by Timothy West, artistic director of the theatre, before opening night, despite being a sellout because of its notoriety. As critic Jack Tinker noted in the Daily Mail: "The performance is not so much downright bad as heroically ludicrous."

On the stage, Lady Macbeth is considered one of the more "commanding and challenging" roles in Shakespeare's work. Other actresses who have played the role include Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies, Glenda Jackson, and Jane Lapotaire.

A performance was staged in the real Macbeth's home of Moray, produced by the National Theatre of Scotland, to take place at Elgin Cathedral. Professional actors, dancers, musicians, school children, and a community cast from the Moray area all took part in what was an important event in the Highland Year of Culture (2007).

In the same year there was general consent among critics that Rupert Goold's production for the Chichester Festival 2007, starring Patrick Stewart and Kate Fleetwood, rivalled Trevor Nunn's acclaimed 1976 RSC production. And when it transferred to the Gielgud Theatre in London, Charles Spencer reviewing for the Daily Telegraph pronounced it the best Macbeth he had ever seen. At the Evening Standard Theatre Awards 2007 the production won both the Best Actor award for Stewart, and the Best Director award for Goold. The same production opened in the US at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2008, moving to Broadway (Lyceum Theatre) after a sold-out run.

In 2003, the British theater company Punchdrunk used The Beaufoy Building in London, an old Victorian school to stage "Sleep No More", the story of Macbeth in the style of a Hitchcock thriller, using reworked music from the soundtrack of classic Hitchcock films. Punchdrunk re-mounted the production, in a newly expanded version, at an abandoned school in Brookline, Massachusetts in October 2009 in association with the American Repertory Theatre.

In 2004, Indian Director Vishal Bharadwaj directed his own adaptation to Macbeth, titled Maqbool. Set in the contemporary Mumbai underworld, the movie starred Irrfan Khan, Tabu, Pankaj Kapur, Om Puri, Naseeruddin Shah and Piyush Mishra in prominent roles. The movie was highly acclaimed and brought fame to director Vishal Bharadwaj and to Irrfan Khan.

In 2006, Harper Collins published the book Macbeath and Son by the Australian author Jackie French. In 2008, Pegasus Books published The Tragedy of Macbeth Part II: The Seed of Banquo, a play by American author and playwright Noah Lukeman which endeavored to pick up where the original Macbeth left off, and to resolve its many loose ends. David Greig's 2010 play Dunsinane also took Macbeth's downfall at Dunsinane as its starting point, with Macbeth's just-ended reign portrayed as long and stable in contrast to Malcolm's.

Following moved from Macbeth 5 August 2011:

Shakespeare's day

Apart from the one mentioned in the Forman document, there are no performances known with certainty in Shakespeare's era. Because of its Scottish theme, the play is sometimes said to have been written for, and perhaps debuted for, King James; however, no external evidence supports this hypothesis. The play's brevity and certain aspects of its staging (for instance, the large proportion of night-time scenes and the unusually large number of off-stage sounds) have been taken as suggesting that the text now extant was revised for production indoors, perhaps at the Blackfriars Theatre, which the King's Men acquired in 1608.

Restoration and 18th century

In the Restoration, Sir William Davenant produced a spectacular "operatic" adaptation of Macbeth, "with all the singing and dancing in it" and special effects like "flyings for the witches" (John Downes, Roscius Anglicanus, 1708). Davenant's revision also enhanced the role of Lady Macduff, making her a thematic foil to Lady Macbeth. In an April 19, 1667, entry in his Diary, Samuel Pepys called Davenant's MacBeth "one of the best plays for a stage, and variety of dancing and music, that ever I saw." The Davenant version held the stage until the middle of the next century. The famous Macbeths of the early 18th century, such as James Quin, employed this version.

Charles Macklin, not otherwise recalled as a great Macbeth, is remembered for performances at Covent Garden in 1773 at which riots broke out, related to Macklin's rivalries with Garrick and William Smith. Macklin performed in Scottish dress, reversing an earlier tendency to dress Macbeth as an English brigadier; he also removed Garrick's death speech and further trimmed Lady Macduff's role. The performance received generally respectful reviews, although George Steevens remarked on the inappropriateness of Macklin (then in his eighties) for the role.

After Garrick, the most celebrated Macbeth of the 18th century was John Philip Kemble; he performed the role most famously with his sister, Sarah Siddons, whose Lady Macbeth was widely regarded as unsurpassable. Kemble continued the trends toward realistic costume and to Shakespeare's language that had marked Macklin's production; Walter Scott reports that he experimented continually with the Scottish dress of the play. Response to Kemble's interpretation was divided; however, Siddons was unanimously praised. Her performance of the "sleepwalking" scene in the fifth act was especially noted; Leigh Hunt called it "sublime." The Kemble-Siddons performances were the first widely influential productions in which Lady Macbeth's villainy was presented as deeper and more powerful than Macbeth's. It was also the first in which Banquo's ghost did not appear on stage.

Kemble's Macbeth struck some critics as too mannered and polite for Shakespeare's text. His successor as the leading actor of London, Edmund Kean, was more often criticised for emotional excess, particularly in the fifth act. Kean's Macbeth was not universally admired; William Hazlitt, for instance, complained that Kean's Macbeth was too like his Richard III. As he did in other roles, Kean exploited his athleticism as a key component of Macbeth's mental collapse. He reversed Kemble's emphasis on Macbeth as noble, instead presenting him as a ruthless politician who collapses under the weight of guilt and fear. Kean, however, did nothing to halt the trend toward extravagance in scene and costume.

Nineteenth century

The Macbeth of the next predominant London actor, William Charles Macready, provoked responses at least as mixed as those given Kean. Macready debuted in the role in 1820 at Covent Garden. As Hazlitt noted, Macready's reading of the character was purely psychological; the witches lost all supernatural power, and Macbeth's downfall arose purely from the conflicts in Macbeth's character. Macready's most famous Lady Macbeth was Helena Faucit, who debuted dismally in the role while still in her mid-20s, but who later achieved acclaim in the role for an interpretation that, unlike Siddons', accorded with contemporary notions of female decorum. After Macready "retired" to America, he continued to perform in the role; in 1849, he was involved in a rivalry with American actor Edwin Forrest, whose partisans hissed Macready at Astor Place, leading to what is commonly called the Astor Place Riot.

Charles Kean and his wife as Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, in costumes aiming to be historically accurate (1858)

The two most prominent Macbeths of mid-century, Samuel Phelps and Charles Kean, were both received with critical ambivalence and popular success. Both are famous less for their interpretation of character than for certain aspects of staging. At Sadler's Wells Theatre, Phelps brought back nearly all of Shakespeare's original text. He brought back the first half of the Porter scene, which had been ignored by directors since Davenant; the second remained cut because of its ribaldry. He abandoned the added music, and reduced the witches to their role in the folio. Just as significantly, he returned to the folio treatment of Macbeth's death. Not all of these decisions succeeded in the Victorian context, and Phelps experimented with various combinations of Shakespeare and Davenant in his more than a dozen productions between 1844 and 1861. His most successful Lady Macbeth was Isabella Glyn, whose commanding presence reminded some critics of Siddons.

The outstanding feature of Kean's productions at the Princess's Theatre after 1850 was their accuracy of costume. Kean achieved his greatest success in modern melodrama, and he was widely viewed as not prepossessing enough for the greatest Elizabethan roles. Audiences did not mind, however; one 1853 production ran for twenty weeks. Presumably part of the draw was Kean's famous attention to historical accuracy; in his productions, as Allardyce Nicoll notes, "even the botany was historically correct."

Henry Irving's first attempt at the role, at the Lyceum Theatre, London in 1875, was a failure. Under the production of Sidney Frances Bateman, and starring alongside Kate Josephine Bateman, Irving may have been affected by the recent death of his manager Hezekiah Linthicum Bateman. Although the production lasted eighty performances, his Macbeth was judged inferior to his Hamlet. His next essay, opposite Ellen Terry at the Lyceum in 1888, fared better, playing for 150 performances. At the urging of Herman Klein, Irving engaged Arthur Sullivan to write a suite of incidental music for the piece. Friends such as Bram Stoker defended his "psychological" reading, based on the supposition that Macbeth had dreamed of killing Duncan before the start of the play. His detractors, among them Henry James, deplored his arbitrary word changes ("would have" for "should have" in the speech at Lady Macbeth's death) and his "neurasthenic" and "finicky" approach to the character.

Twentieth century to present

Barry Vincent Jackson staged an influential modern-dress production with the Birmingham Repertory in 1928; the production reached London, playing at the Royal Court Theatre. It received mixed reviews; Eric Maturin was judged an inadequate Macbeth, though Mary Merrall's vampish Lady was reviewed favourably. Though The Times judged it a "miserable failure," the production did much to overturn the tendency to scenic and antiquarian excess that had peaked with Charles Kean.

The Federal Theatre Project Negro Unit's production of Macbeth, 1935

Among the most publicised productions of the 20th century was mounted by the Federal Theater Project at the Lafayette Theatre in Harlem from 14 April to 20 June 1936. Orson Welles, in his first stage production, directed Jack Carter and Edna Thomas, with Canada Lee playing Banquo, in an all African American production. It became known as the Voodoo Macbeth, because Welles set the play in post-colonial Haiti. His direction emphasised spectacle and suspense: his dozens of "African" drums recalled Davenant's chorus of witches. Welles later directed and played the starring role in a 1948 film adaptation of the play.

Laurence Olivier played Malcolm in the 1929 production and Macbeth in 1937 at the Old Vic Theatre in a production that saw the Vic's artistic director Lilian Baylis pass away the night before it opened. Olivier's makeup was so thick and stylised for that production that Vivien Leigh was quoted as saying "You hear Macbeth's first line, then Larry's makeup comes on, then Banquo comes on, then Larry comes on". Olivier later starred in what is among the most famous 20th-century productions, by Glen Byam Shaw at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1955. Vivien Leigh played Lady Macbeth. The supporting cast, which Harold Hobson denigrated, included many actors who went on to successful Shakespearean careers: Ian Holm played Donalbain, Keith Michell was Macduff, and Patrick Wymark the Porter. Olivier was the key to success. The intensity of his performance, particularly in the conversation with the murderers and in confronting Banquo's ghost, seemed to many reviewers to recall Edmund Kean. Plans for a film version faltered after the box-office failure of Olivier's Richard III. Kenneth Tynan asserted flatly of this performance that "no one has ever succeeded as Macbeth"—until Olivier.

Olivier's co-star in his 1937 Old Vic Theatre production, Judith Anderson, had an equally triumphant association with the play. She played Lady Macbeth on Broadway opposite Maurice Evans in a production directed by Margaret Webster that ran for 131 performances in 1941, the longest run of the play in Broadway history. Anderson and Evans performed the play on television twice, in 1954 and 1962, with Maurice Evans winning an Emmy Award the 1962 production and Anderson winning the award for both presentations. A film adaptation in 1971 titled The Tragedy of Macbeth was directed by Roman Polanski and executive-produced by Hugh Hefner.

A Japanese film adaptation, Throne of Blood (Kumonosu jô, 1957), features Toshirô Mifune in the lead role and is set in feudal Japan. It was well-received and, despite having almost none of the play's script, critic Harold Bloom called it "the most successful film version of Macbeth."

One of the most notable 20th-century productions is that of Trevor Nunn for the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1976. Nunn had directed Nicol Williamson and Helen Mirren in the play two years earlier, but that production had largely failed to impress. In 1976, Nunn produced the play with a minimalist set at The Other Place; this small, nearly round stage focused attention on the psychological dynamics of the characters. Both Ian McKellen in the title role and Judi Dench as Lady Macbeth received exceptionally favourable reviews. Dench won the 1977 SWET Best Actress award for her performance and in 2004, members of the RSC voted her performance the greatest by an actress in the history of the company.

Nunn's production transferred to London in 1977 and was later filmed for television. It was to overshadow Peter Hall's 1978 production with Albert Finney as Macbeth and Dorothy Tutin as Lady Macbeth. But the most infamous recent Macbeth was staged at the Old Vic in 1980. Peter O'Toole and Frances Tomelty took the leads in a production (by Bryan Forbes) that was publicly disowned by Timothy West, artistic director of the theatre, before opening night, despite being a sellout because of its notoriety. As critic Jack Tinker noted in the Daily Mail: "The performance is not so much downright bad as heroically ludicrous."

On the stage, Lady Macbeth is considered one of the more "commanding and challenging" roles in Shakespeare's work. Other actresses who have played the role include Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies, Janet Suzman, Glenda Jackson, and Jane Lapotaire.

In 2001 the film Scotland, PA was released. The action is moved to 1970's Pennsylvania and revolves around Joe Macbeth and his wife Pat taking control of a hamburger cafe from Norm Duncan. The film was directed by Billy Morrissette and stars James LeGros, Maura Tierney and Christopher Walken.

A performance was staged in the real Macbeth's home of Moray, produced by the National Theatre of Scotland, to take place at Elgin Cathedral. Professional actors, dancers, musicians, school children, and a community cast from the Moray area all took part in what was an important event in the Highland Year of Culture (2007).

In the same year there was general consent among critics that Rupert Goold's production for the Chichester Festival 2007, starring Patrick Stewart and Kate Fleetwood, rivalled Trevor Nunn's acclaimed 1976 RSC production. And when it transferred to the Gielgud Theatre in London, Charles Spencer reviewing for the Daily Telegraph pronounced it the best Macbeth he had ever seen. At the Evening Standard Theatre Awards 2007 the production won both the Best Actor award for Stewart, and the Best Director award for Goold. The same production opened in the US at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2008, moving to Broadway (Lyceum Theatre) after a sold-out run. In 2009 Goold again directed Stewart and Fleetwood in an acclaimed film version of their production, which aired as part of PBS' Great Performances series on October 6, 2010.

In 2003, the British theatre company Punchdrunk used The Beaufoy Building in London, an old Victorian school to stage "Sleep No More", the story of Macbeth in the style of a Hitchcock thriller, using reworked music from the soundtrack of classic Hitchcock films. Punchdrunk re-mounted the production, in a newly expanded version, at an abandoned school in Brookline, Massachusetts in October 2009 in association with the American Repertory Theatre.

In 2004, Indian director Vishal Bharadwaj directed his own adaptation to Macbeth, titled Maqbool. Set in the contemporary Mumbai underworld, the movie starred Irrfan Khan, Tabu, Pankaj Kapur, Om Puri, Naseeruddin Shah and Piyush Mishra in prominent roles. The movie was highly acclaimed and brought fame to director Bharadwaj and to Irrfan Khan.

Sequels by other authors

In 2006, Harper Collins published the book Macbeth and Son by the Australian author Jackie French. In 2008, Pegasus Books published The Tragedy of Macbeth Part II: The Seed of Banquo, a play by American author and playwright Noah Lukeman which endeavored to pick up where the original Macbeth left off, and to resolve its many loose ends.

David Greig's 2010 play Dunsinane took Macbeth's downfall at Dunsinane as its starting point, with Macbeth's just-ended reign portrayed as long and stable in contrast to Malcolm's.

Note, following section should stay here permanently, (even if empty!)