Thinking back to television when I was a kid – that is, the early 1980s in Switzerland -, I mainly remember these: German entertainment shows featuring all the beige in the world, the cheesy US series of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, the likes of Simon & Simon and Knight Rider, and the Japanese anime adaptations of (mostly) European children’s literature, from Heidi to Pinocchio. Just as much as the daily and weekly fare, though, I remember the ‘prestige television’ of the time: the big miniseries that featured impressive casts and that by and large were concerned with more mature themes. I remember these being something of a family event that we’d gather in front of the TV to watch: Roots, Fatal Vision (starring Karl Malden, that big-nosed embodiment of integrity), the German Das Boot (which I’ll always think of as a miniseries, since I don’t think I ever saw the original cinema edit). To pre-teen me, these felt excitingly like grown-up television, and while I would probably not have put it like that at the time, they felt so much less generic and more ambitious than the ongoing series I was otherwise watching at the time.
Reader, we are not in Jane Austen country anymore. Any Austen adaptation must end in a marriage, whereas Lady Macbeth starts with one, not a happy affair, and it gets worse from here on out. The source of this story is, of course, that famous Scottish play, and then there is Nikolai Leskov’s novella Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District from 1865, which is said to be loosely based on a real crime. William Oldroyd’s movie, from a screenplay by Alice Birch, could have approached the character of Lady Macbeth from one of those angles. Instead, the movie shows us a young bride called Katherine who initially does not object to be married to a wealthy nobleman who resides in a bleak, solitary country estate. The troubles start during their wedding night: the husband is a gruff alcoholic and under his father’s thumb. He orders her to undress and face the wall, and then he puts out the light and goes to sleep. She discovers that he is impotent and wants to keep her indoors. The mood of the movie has more in common with Wuthering Heights than any Merchant-Ivory movie. 
A Damn Fine Cup of Culture 