Documentary film-maker Sophie Fiennes returns with another palate-cleansingly meditative, unhurried and intelligent movie about artistic process; in this case, the process of acting – or to be more specific, rehearsing and workshopping ideas. Actors are shown developing approaches to Macbeth under the cool eye of Cheek by Jowl director Declan Donnellan.
This is the part of “acting” that the movie observes in detail; it doesn’t cover the other business of auditions, table reads, tech runs, dress runs and performing night after night. With its clear, daylit approach, it is comparable to Fiennes’s 2010 study of German artist Anselm Kiefer, Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow – but is very unlike Fiennes’s atypically hyperactive and flashier films about the movies, The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema and The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology, whose style is more driven by their unruly presenter, Slavoj Žižek.
