Shakespeare on Screen season at the Chiswick Cinema

Michael Billington introduces the Shakespeare On Screen season at Chiswick Cinema showing this autumn

‘Shakespeare on Screen’ starts at the Chiswick Cinema Sunday, 30 August

Guest blog by Michael Billington

A couple of years back Chris Parker, chief programmer at the Chiswick Cinema, invited me to host a season of films written by Harold Pinter. It proved a popular success helped by guest appearances from Jeremy Irons and Rupert Everett.

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When Chris asked for a follow-up I suggested Shakespeare on Screen which starts this Sunday (30 August) with a showing of Coriolanus directed by and starring Ralph Fiennes and prefaced by a specially recorded interview with the man himself: Mr Fiennes, that is, not Shakespeare.

Ralph Fiennes in Coriolanus (2011) /IMDb

The only problem with a Shakespeare season is the multiplicity of choice. Incredibly, the first attempt to put Shakespeare on screen dates back to 1899 when the camera recorded a scene from Beerbohm Tree’s production of King John.

We haven’t gone back that far but we’ve come up with seven titles that show the amazing range of Shakespeare films. Fiennes’s Coriolanus is itself astonishing: a Roman tragedy set against the background of a modern Balkan war with a cast to die for, including Brian Cox, Vanessa Redgrave and Jessica Chastain.

Michael Billington asks Ralph Fiennes about filming Coriolanus

We follow that on 20 September with a screening of Sir Kenneth Branagh’s Much Ado About Nothing starring himself and Emma Thompson, shot in the ravishingly beautiful Tuscan countryside and arguably the best film of a Shakespeare comedy ever made. Once again we’ll begin the evening with an interview with Sir Ken recorded for the occasion.

Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson in Much Ado About Nothing (1993) /IMDb, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc.

You will find a full list of the films on the Chiswick Cinema website but I hope there is something for all tastes.

Chiswick Cinema – Shakespeare on Screen

We will be showing Roman Polanski’s Macbeth which, like a lot of his work, is about the resonance of evil, and Orson Welles’s Chimes at Midnight in which he himself plays Falstaff, and Sir John Gielgud Henry the Fourth: this is a late Welles masterwork all too rarely seen.

Jon Finch and Francesca Annis in Macbeth (1971) /IMDb

There will also be two Japanese films by the great Akira Kurosawa: Throne of Blood and Ran: the former a thrilling samurai version of Macbeth and the latter a re-imagining of King Lear that, in some ways, makes more sense than the original.

Toshiro Mifune in Throne of Blood (1957) /IMDb

Finally in December comes the 1961 film of West Side Story that sets Romeo and Juliet in the streets of New York and that won ten Oscars.

Rita Moreno, Suzie Kaye, Yvonne Wilder, Maria Henley in West Side Story (1961) /IMDb

I hope the season will show that, while Shakespeare wrote for the stage, he also belongs in the cinema.

Michael Billington, who lives in Chiswick, writes for the Guardian and was its theatre critic from 1971 to 2019. Last year he celebrated 60 years as a critic and he still writes reviews for Country Life and several other publications.

Last year he spoke about his long career at a Media Club session hosted by The Chiswick Calendar at George IV.

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