Macbeth, for a nine year old?

[Sonatensatz]

Just had ds's topic letter home informing me that they are going to be studying Macbeth this term. Anyone else think this is a very unsuitable choice of subject matter for primary school? I remember reading it in secondary school and the themes in it are very unpleasant.

Don't forget how gory and frightening most fairy tales are. Little Red Riding Hood, Hansel and Gretel etc. Children love a bit of gore and murder!

I think that they would certainly have to pitch it at 9 year old level....I personally found that I didn't fully understand my A Level English Literature texts at 17 - it was only when I had more life experience that they made proper sense some years later.

I think introducing certain texts can be very confusing for children.

Fairy tales were not originally intended for children but we happily tell them about wicked step mothers sending a child into the forest to have her heart cut out and fathers abandoning their children to be fattened up for lunch by wicked witches.

Yes, but we tend to leave out the aspects of Sleeping Beauty where the prince goes waaaaaay beyond kissing and Sleeping Beauty only awakes when she's in labour with his child. And by and large tales that didn't originally have a happy ending (e.g. The Little Mermaid) get given one before we tell them to children these days.

In contrast, in Macbeth a small child is killed in his own home, on stage, in front of his mother just after she's explained to him that it's all his father's fault for not being there to protect his family (and then his mother and all his siblings are killed offstage) . That could be at least problematic for a primary age group in an unabridged version.

Have you watched Disney's Snow White?

Yes, and noticed (a) distinct presence of happy ending and (b) distinct absence of coda in which Snow White and new husband then force the stepmother to dance in red hot iron boots until she falls down dead, as in the original fairy tale (parenthetically, Neil Neil Gaiman's short story "Snow, Glass, Apples" is an excellent revisionist take on Snow White for adult readers that faces that head on and uses it to inform the rest of the story).

As others have said - it's best to check the approach.

DS2 played MacDuff's son in a (brilliant) modern adaptation of MacBeth.

He was beaten up before being drowned in the kitchen sink (not easy for me to watch, let alone anyone else !).

I don't remember the matinee performance being any different.

DD did Macbeth last year. She was Y5, so 9y. They covered it in English plus they did a play of Macbeth, with the Y6 children alongside it.
Was covered using the real words, children's versions of the book, a visiting Shakespeare company, the school play, etc. Didn't even think to consider it unsuitable tbh - she seemed to enjoy it.

a It wasn't very happy for the queen regardless of the absence of hot coals (I think it's the reason I'm afraid of heights )