Macbeth ­ A Study Of Power For Our Times:
 The South Bank Show
 Sunday 8 July 2007 @ 10.45pm

 Ambition, tyranny, war and witchcraft are just some of the ideas that
Shakespeare dealt with in Macbeth. The South Bank Show looks at how, 400
years after the play was first performed, the ideas it addresses, almost
more than any other of Shakespeare¹s works, have daily resonance in
political and cultural life. Few of Shakespeare¹s plays have inspired so
much contemporary drama, using many of Macbeth¹s themes of violence,
intolerance and terrorism, which are so valid today.

 Melvyn Bragg visits Cawdor Castle to set the scene, and establish the
ŒScottish¹ play in the Jacobean time in which it was written. How it echoes
some of our political landscape today with political power, religious
intolerance and terrorism being high on the agenda.

 Macbeth is a study in the psychology of ambition, political power struggles
and, ultimately, evil tyranny: a seemingly ordinary person, who acquires an
insatiable and then murderous appetite for power.

 Macbeth has often been used as inspiration for portrayals of the government
of the day ­ Francis Urquhart, the ruthless Conservative politician in
Michael Dobbs¹ House of Cards. However, Blair¹s government must be the most
dramatised British government in television history, and Macbeth has
regularly been used for reference. In The Deal one could compare the power
struggle of Blair and Brown to that of Macbeth and Duncan; while the
portrayal of Cherie Blair is arguably inspired by Lady Macbeth. Dramas like
Alistair Beaton¹s The Trial of Tony Blair also draw from Macbeth ­ from
Blair being haunted by ghosts from the Iraq War, to a scene in which a
guilty Tony Blair scrubs his hands just like Lady Macbeth.

 The South Bank Show looks at the characters of the play. How the characters
of Lady Macbeth and Macbeth¹s three witches have become archetypal figures.
The media often use the term ³Lady Macbeth² as a label for powerful women
e.g. Barbara Amiel, Hillary Clinton, Winnie Mandela and Cherie Blair.
Whilst, Jade, Jo and Danielle were dubbed ³Macbeth¹s witches² by the popular
media during the Big Brother furore.

 The theme of tyranny in Macbeth has inspired several films and plays based
on Macbeth. In recent years writers and commentators have drawn many
parallels between Macbeth¹s Scotland and Africa today. Giles Foden bore this
in mind when writing his novel The Last King of Scotland, and he talks to
The South Bank ShoW about why he drew so much from Macbeth when writing his
novel about Idi Amin.

 Contributors include: the actors Ian McKellen and Simon Russell Beale;
Michael Dobbs, Shakespearean academic Jonathan Bates, Kenneth Baker, Helena
Kennedy, Giles Foden, Shirley Williams; and foreign correspondent Robert
Fisk who sees a great deal of Macbeth in Saddam and his tyrannical regime ­
not just in terms of his violence but because he was paranoid and
superstitious like Macbeth.

 Still leading the way, The South Bank Show is the first ITV1 programme to
be available on the internet in both podcast (audio) and vodcast (video)
format at www.itv.com/southbank .

 Presented and edited by Melvyn Bragg
 Produced and directed by Aurora Gunn.