Kenneth Branagh in Bold `Macbeth

Kenneth Branagh as Macbeth and Alex Kingston as Lady Macbeth

Just as the Marion Cotillard-Michael Fassbender `Macbeth toils in post-production, this stage production with a long-time Shakespearean favorite apparently had a fine run in New York City earlier this summer.  Lady Macbeth is positively vicious toward, and emasculating of, Macbeth, especially when he wavers so agonizingly about killing King Duncan.  While Macbeth becomes bolder over time, he does so mainly out of fright and dread and, in the end, fatalism.  In other words, he seems more wimpish than boldish.

But from the sounds of Thom Geier's review, Branagh's Macbeth is truly bold.  In the following image, for example, he seems to attack Lady Macbeth:

(image credit)

As the tragic end draws near, Macbeth finds out that his wife has died:

She should have died hereafter;
There would have been a time for such a word.
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

It is one of the most harrowing set of lines in literature and stage, and it is the final straw that breaks the back of any semblance of life and love that Macbeth had.  I had the pleasure and fortune of performing this monologue on stage, at the end of an acting class in Dubai six years ago.

In his moving final soliloquy, he inserts a lengthy pause before spitting out the word idiot as if he has only just realized the folly of his strutting and fretting upon the dirt-clumped stage. In that brief speech, the actor manages to signify just about everything about his remarkable Macbeth.

Reference:  Macbeth (2014).