INNOCENCE, WICKEDNESS , RAGE
Ti Green’s set is ,at first, a gilded wonder of dignified curves and arches, palatially spectacular when filled with the red robes of the Duke and senators. But – as a pleasing surprise once the Cyprus war begins – those very curves and arches will shift , fly and veer to create a vigorous ballet of uncertainty and collapse against a stormy background. Their dignity gone: maybe a metaphor for what will happen to the Moor himself.
He of course is David Harewood, all man and all soldier. We meet him smart and assured, hands behind his back and head cocked intelligently as if at a military briefing , wholly confident during his arraignment by the senate and old Brabantio (the latter amusingly emerges furious from a high box stage- left when Roderigo, puppet-run by Iago, wakes him with news of Desdemona’s elopement). Harewood’s Othello is grippingly impressive,fluently passionate in his tale of how Desdemona had listened to his dangers and sufferings “and I loved her that she did pity them.” He is laughing in his luck at winning her, and Caitlin Fitzgerald, willowy and aristocratic , laughs with him in perfect accord like any happy girlfriend, young and naive and proudly thrilled to follow the drum.
It all feels fresh: director Tom Morris has deliberately sets a tone of lightness and youth from the start, and the staging of the hard-partying soldiery – brawl and all – is brilliantly episodic as Iago orchestrates Cassio’s drunkenness with elegant deftness. Luke Treadaway’s Cassio, healthily young and blithe, is perfect to prefigure the later furious line from Iago about “the daily beauty in his life”. But the real wonder of this prdocution is Toby Jones’ Iago. Shorter, stumpier than the leader he hates so much, the aggrieved lieutenant is a classical specimen of the guy who for all his efficiency has never been seen as star or leadership material, and bitterly resents it. We’ve all encountered him at work. But beneath that normality is an unsettlingly everyday evil: his conspiratorial grins and asides to the audience beguile and repel at once. The process of his manoeuvres has an artful metronome accuracy, skilfully pushing every button on Othello’s insecurity: sexual ,racial, the need to be liked, his foreign-born sense of ‘otherness’ aggravated when Iago hints that Venetian women have a different attitude to fidelity. And through all this first half of the play, this awful process gets a remarkable number of audience laughs: shocked ones perhaps, but fascinated by a masterclass in manipulation.
That entertaining, deftly moving lightness makes the abrupt darkening of Othello, Harewood with small moves and tics expressing a fragility hidden before. His seizure and the wild slap of his bride are properly unnerving. Meanwhile Jones’ Iago assuredly roams the stage, his suggestiveness ever dirtier: I had never quite appreciated how subtly Shakespeare does this, prim moments early on coarsening to filth. Harewood throws himself into Garrickian high-volume rant and rage, but his initial individuality inevitably gets lost in the perennial and universal dreadfulness of violent male rage. Maybe this is why the final murderous scenes are suddenly set beneath great lighting-rigs , as if to remind us of the dreadful familiarity of these irrational femicide crime scenes .
But Morris allows grace and room to the women in the play’s late wistful gentleness, fragments of the willow song speaking for all victims of this familiar madness. Fitzgerald gives heartrending incredulity to Desdemona’s final bewilderment, hope, and terror and Vinette Robinson is a superb Emilia: spittingly magnificent in Shakespeare’s greatest expression of female defiance. It stays with you for hours, Iago haunting your dreams. As he should.
Trh.co.uk to 17 jan
rating 4
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