Where is Macbeth's soul?

I love

William Shakespeare's tragedy, go ahead.

I see the film adaptation by Joel Cohen, playing Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand as the lead couple, the Macbeths.

Good actors, good lighting, good art direction, good costumes, in general everything is fine, it's aesthetically beautiful, technically fantastic... but something is missing.

What?

More information

Joel Coen was missing Shakespeare, for good

I think that what it lacks lies in the adaptation from theater to film. I am asked for this article to speak from the point of view of a person, like me, who knows Shakespeare from the stage. I will try to explain myself.

is written for a theater, with all that that entails: a live audience, a unique space and direct contact between the actor and the spectator. The actor and the director must direct the audience's gaze where Shakespeare tells them, there are no filters, there are no camera movements. And this is why the film adaptation must attend to the profound reasons that drive this story and its characters.

With this work, the author, almost for the first time in the history of theater, enters the heads of the characters, their psychology, their fears and desires, their nightmares and prayers.

's terror

comes to us through his monologues, Lady Macbeth's cruelty through her invocations to hell. It is not enough to bring the camera closer and whisper the tragedy to us. Desire in

screams, cries, despairs and does so through the beauty of the word, which has to arrive with all its nuances. The fury of the tragedy depends on the emotional impact on the viewer, on the empathy, as contradictory as it may seem, that we feel for the murderers. The authentic adaptation of

it is the one that makes us see ourselves in a mirror, that we receive our most sinister image.

That is the soul of

.

However, this version does not have that soul, it is only poetic in the service of poetic.

A Chinese vase speaks of its own aesthetic beauty, this version resembles this, the beautiful and gloomy photograph of a castle with no inhabitants inside.

Director Joel Coen and his left Frances McDormand, on the set of 'Macbeth'.

Alison Rose (AP)

Macbeth

is passion, it is fear of committing a crime and that the spur of desire pushes you to the horror of committing it, to turn away from life, to embrace violence, hatred, suspicion, guilt.

Since the murder is committed there will never be peace, Macbeth has killed the dream and everything becomes a nightmare, a bad trip with bad companions, running straight to death dragging everything in our path.

talks about how we build horror, how we use horror and how all this leads us to madness, to the darkest room that lives in our brain: "Life is a story told by a madman, full of noise and fury, which means absolutely nothing.

Carmen Machi and Javier Gutiérrez, in the adaptation of 'Macbeth' directed by Andrés Lima in 2014.Luis Castilla

The tragedy of

is the detailed portrait of the psychology of the human being in the face of the ambition for power. The struggle for political power sows the history of the world of crimes between kings, of fratricidal wars, of crazy soldiers, of powerful murderers and their best adviser: interest.

Respecting and ensuring that what Shakespeare tells us reaches the viewers is the task of anyone who tells the tale of the unmentionable (in theatrical environments it is bad luck to mention the name of the protagonist of this play). The author's message is so powerful that superstition envelops the story of this story about superstition. Everything is based on the tale of a witch, a tale of uncontrollable passion, thirst for power and blood. Akira Kurosawa adapted

like No One on His

. Orson Welles portrayed the drunken ambition of the human being in his film, as beautiful as it is cruel. The Macbeths are the perfect marriage, united for disaster, as were the Ceausescus, the Pinochets and so many others. It is what has the absence of democracy.

Macbeth

, unfortunately, is still current, even if it is the story of some witches, who do not exist, but there are… there are.

See this version and tell me.

Andrés Lima