Lady Macbeth does not tell the story of the Shakespearean anti-heroine, but that of Katherine (Florence Pugh), a woman in rural England in 1865 who is stifled by her loveless marriage to a bitter man twice her age, and his cold, unforgiving family. When she embarks on a passionate affair with a young worker on her husband’s estate, a force is unleashed inside her so powerful that she will stop at nothing to get what she wants.
The film is directed by William Oldroyd and written by Alice Birch, both of whom have made their names in theatre – he as the Director in Residence at the Young Vic Theatre and working with the RSC, and she as an award-winning playwright with work performed at the Royal Court and the RSC.
Oldroyd had recently made his first steps into film directing with the Sundance London award-winning short Best, and when he and Birch were introduced to each other by their shared agent the conversation quickly turned to their common interests in feature films.
Birch had read the 1865 Russian novella Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk by Nikolai Leskov, and felt that its themes – the subordination of women in society, life in rural communities, and of passionate illicit love – were exciting ones for a film adaption. The original story, which had been published by Dostoyevsky, was most famously adapted into a Russian opera by Shostakovich in the early 1930s – and banned by Stalin for being too subversive.
The film becomes something quite different from what we had been anticipating
As soon as Birch told Oldroyd the story, he was fascinated. “In literature of that period,” Oldroyd says, “Women like Katherine traditionally suffer in silence, fade away, or commit suicide. But here we have a young protagonist who fights for her independence, and decides her own fate in a bloodthirsty way.”
Oldroyd and Birch relied heavily on the plot of the novella, but made some large alterations for its cinematic incarnation.
Producer Fodhla Cronin O’Reilly, who had been Oscar nominated for a short film in 2014, met Oldroyd through a mutual friend, and a bond was quickly established. “The most essential collaboration on the film was with Fodhla,” says Oldroyd. “Because my background is predominantly in theatre, I relied very heavily on her film experience to make that transition and to understand the specifics of how the process worked.”
To bring their thoughts together, Alice drafted a short prose piece on why she wanted to write the story. Birch says: “As a writer I am drawn, inevitably, to stories, to characters, to landscapes and languages that have the potential to cross into new territories.
“The trajectory is, initially, one that is not unfamiliar to us. Yet the film takes new turns, is constantly surprising and urges an audience to keep up. Katherine will stop at nothing, and as she embarks upon a series of murders, the film becomes something quite different from what we had been anticipating.”
Lady Macbeth, an independent production featuring a relatively unknown cast, has already stuck a chord with critics. Time Out London declares that this “brilliantly feminist British indie film plunges a cold, sharp knife into the back of bonnet dramas”, describing it as “like a Jane Austen story with a dash of sex and murder and a 19th-century heroine who might have swallowed the works of Caitlin Moran and Gloria Steinem”.
Empire Magazine concurs, saying: “this intelligently scripted and imposingly played costume noir revisits the conventions of Victorian melodrama to comment on modern attitudes to oppression, prejudice and morality.”