Othello
Trafalgar Studios Summer 2004

The redesigned and renamed Whitehall theatre plays host to this transfer from Stratford of a Royal Shakespeare Company production that should please all but the most jaded of audiences. Director Gregory Doran and his cast give us what  may not be the most exalted or passionate of tragedies, but rather a believable and deeply-moving life-sized study in villainy and destruction.

South African actor Sello Maake ka-Ncube introduces Othello as a happy man, comfortable in his skin and his place in society, with even the slightest hint of an Uncle Tom to his amiability. When Iago fills him with the suspicion that his white wife is untrue to him, his response is not the towering anger of some Othellos, but rather an inward withdrawal into pain.

The actor uses the intimate feel of the redesigned theatre beautifully by letting us see anguish in his eyes and inability to cope in small gestures that die out before they're completed. It is quite possible that the experienced Shakespearean will have seen Othellos more frightening in their rage or madness, but not more moving in the picture of an ordinary, innocent man forced to feel more pain than he can bear.

As Iago, Antony Sher also offers a more life-sized portrait than is the norm. Though he occasionally lapses into the same gruff career soldier shtick that underlay his Macbeth and Titus, for the most part he has found in Iago a man believably driven by little angers.

Though actors and Shakespeare scholars have wrestled for centuries with what one called Iago's 'motiveless malignity,' the sense that he is more filled with hate than any of the reasons he gives seem to justify, Sher makes it chillingly possible that missing out on a promotion and vaguely suspecting that just about anyone onstage might have cuckolded him could drive this little man into a murderous insanity.

The interpretation also makes believable one of the play's central difficulties, the fact that everyone trusts and believes Iago even as he is manipulating them. This short, slightly tubby little man with the funny moustache is a bit of a joke to the others, and it is exactly because they can't take him seriously as a threat that he is so dangerous.

Sher also uses the theatre with particular skill and sensitivity, drawing us into Iago's thought processes, turning  his many soliloquies into thinking-out-loud glimpses into his mad rationality.

The rest of the cast are less impressive. Though other actresses have occasionally been able to find complex shadings to the somewhat thankless role, Lisa Dillon's Desdemona is just a walking victim-in-waiting, while Justin Avoth's Cassio has even fewer colours. Amanda Harris has a few strong moments as Emelia, and Mark Lockyer's Roderigo is essentially a Guy Henry impersonation.

And, while director Doran keeps things moving, the production suffers from the RSC's endemic elephantiasis, stretching well over three hours in an inadequately air-conditioned theatre.

Gerald Berkowitz

Return to TheatreguideLondon home page.

Review - Othello - RSC Trafalgar 2004