I can’t say I shared your feelings about the Merchant, however. I must admit I bought it in Tesco’s when I was shopping, went straight home, opened a bottle of wine and sat down to watch it, so perhaps not the best frame of mind, but I found it a bit… worthy. I did something similar with Michael Amereyda’s Hamlet, with Ethan Hawke, and loved that, but it was a different SORT of film. I did like the Jonathan Miller TV version of Merchant, with Olivier as Shylock, although some critic, ( I forget who) rightly said that he had obviously modelled his performance on Scrooge McDuck. Generally I don’t like TV versions, which fall between two stools, but that, I thought, worked well.

I too would love to see Julie Taymor do another Shakespeare. Taymor’s Macbeth would be a good one, I think. We are about due for a good new Macbeth. I haven’t seen the very newest one, but hope to soon. I thought the James Macavoy version in the Shakespeare Retold season was good, but not really Macbeth. The Orson Welles version, modelled on Ming the Merciless, is hard to take seriously these days, (although CHimes and Othello both still work,) and while Polanski’s version has a lot of really great things about it, (particularly Francesca Annis, and some fantastic location stuff on Bamburgh beach), it’s become classroomised. I tend to head for Throne of Blood if I feel an overwhelming urge to see a Macbeth, which happens every…now and then.

Actually, I think Luhrmann’s Romeo+Juliet did a great job of combining the spirit of both earlier films, though Leo DiCaprio and Claire Danes’ performances do not improve massively with each re-viewing….

But of course Zeffirelli gets major kudos for casting my namesake, Milo O’Shea, as Friar Lawrence.

If & when Julie Taymor’s Across the Universe (2007) is released, I hope she returns to Shakespeare (though I suppose her stage production of Disney’s Lion King was technically a Hamlet adaptation…).

Coriolanus directed by Taymor starring Steven Berkoff…. now that would be fun!

On a side note, I just realised that I forgot to mention Michael Radford’s Merchant of Venice in my list of favourite filmed Shakespeares. A fine adaptation of a really difficult play, and Al Pacino(!) was terrific as Shylock.

Next question: Romeo and Juliets - Zeffirrelli or Baz Luhrmann? I like both, I have to say, for very different reasons. Which side of this heated debate do you land on?

Branagh is one of the directors of Shakespeare on film who deserves the sort of praise Dr. Johnson reserved for a dancing bear. It’s not that he does it well, it’s that he does it at all. His Hamlet is probably the least interesting of all the filmed versions in the last sixty years. It is overblown, self-indulgent, long and, worst of all, BORING. Branagh himself is rather vanilla as the Prince, and the star-struck way he casts the film overbalances it hideously. The first half of the film is completely dominated by Jack Lemmon, and becomes a film about an old soldier whose boss’s son is a bit confused, and we are treated to more sledgehammer-to-crack-a-walnut casting with Gerard Depardeiu as Voltimand, the one character that nearly every production in history has cut, Charlton Heston as the Player King, and many others. I have to say that these performances are often really good, but mostly Branagh is just less interesting than the actors he shares the screen with.

This is not, however, the main problem. Branagh as a director of his own performances in films of Shakespeare’s plays overeggs like mad. Compare his Henry V to Olivier’s , taking the St Crispin’s Day speech just as an example . He gives himself huge close-ups, plays rousing music under the big speeches, cuts away to hordes of dewey-eyed spectators, and bellows like anything. Olivier, on the other hand, uses far less voice, and gradually moves the camera up and out to encompass the entire army. This mirrors the movement of the ideas in the speech, and moves from the particular to the general. More importantly, Olivier always knows exactly how big he is in the frame. Branagh does not. The Branagh version is far too transparent in its manipulation of the audience, and consequently is unmoving, whereas Olivier does the speech about as well as anyone could ever do it. Since they both directed themselves we have to assume they both got what they intended.

Henry V is not Hamlet, and the films are made for different times, but Branagh has deliberately courted the comparison with Olivier, having filmed Hamlet and Henry V and appeared in Othello as Olivier did, (although admittedly playing Iago rather than Othello himself). He has even filmed As You Like It. (Olivier’s film performance as Orlando in the 1936 version has just been re-released). Schoolkids nowadays will undoubtedly prefer Branagh’s films, as in Olivier’s much of the acting appears dated, but if anyone takes the time to actually compare the films to the original plays, Olivier wins hands down, and in terms of cinematic invention and a pure sense of filmic possibilities the difference is even more pronounced.

The trouble with so many Shakespeare films is that they are made with one eye on the classroom. Branagh’s films are used by English teachers everywhere, and there is nothing to put off a GCSE teacher in any of them. The best that can be said is that they are less deadly than the AWFUL BBC Shakespeares, which have done more to kill Shakespeare for future generations than anything else in history. On the other hand, if you want a good, exciting film of Hamlet, try Michael Amereyda’s with Ethan Hawke, best of all Grigori Kosintsev’s with Innokenti Smoktunovsky, or even Zeffirrelli’s with Mel Gibson.