Tim Carroll’s Othello, now playing in the main house at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, marks an RSC return to the play after a nine-year hiatus following Hugh Quarshie’s memorable stint as the lead. Whereas the 2015 production was a busy, hyper-modern, souped-up, tuned-in version of the tale of the green-eyed monster; this authentically-clad interpretation seems somehow fresher and more relatable through a purer prism.
The horribly ordinary cloak of jealousy envelops and unravels its targets as surely as canal mists engulf Venetian streets
A fusion of contemporary lighting and set design against Venetian costumes of the early 17th century reinforces our understanding that Shakespeare’s themes are not of an age but for all time. This stylistic disconnect never jars, but serves as just one of the many threads of uneasy alliance and circumstantial juxtaposition which are woven throughout the text: something furthered by the silver cords which drape the set and conjure the shadows and half-truths which lead the characters towards their final, dreadful moments.
The effect is visually breath-taking: pointy beards, shorn pates and heaving bosoms popping from the dark recesses of the stage in Carravagian menace, our thoughts drawn to what may be happening just out of sight. This sense is elevated by freezes and some lovely physical business on the voms, where entrances and exits are held almost in otherness until the cogs of fate align.
The play itself, of course, throws up perennial questions of racial profiling, prejudice, machination, and domestic violence: themes still woefully recognisable to an audience four hundred years removed from the original. Unwittingly caught in the crosshairs of these intrigues, Juliet Rylance’s Desdemona is no naïve slip of a girl bowled along by innocence and seduced by position; but a woman of substance every bit as commanding in stature and rhetoric as her decorated husband. Othello’s betrayal seems all the more terrible because it attacks a woman so wholly sure of herself and her continued devotion rather than a simpering wraith buffeted about on the rocks of happenstance. What a consort she would have been: and what a future he has thrown away on the altar of rumour.
Anastasia Hille creates Desdemona’s attendant Emilia as a spare, worn, husk of a woman: defeated without fully realising it and manipulated almost without caring. Until the facts stare her finally, horrifically, in the face, she has neither strength nor purpose: her outburst on seeing her lifeless mistress a lament not just for a good life lost, but her own so unrealised. It is a generous performance which gives Rylance space to fully inhabit a Desdemona so powerful and intelligent that for a worm such as Iago to even dream of winning her prompts as much hilarity as it does revulsion.
As Iago, Will Keen is utterly mesmerising: every tic, drop of the knee, and swipe of the head suggesting the army of inadequacies which threaten to overrun him. We can see the disappointments and put-downs of his childhood, adolescence, and adult life laid bare in his apparent nonchalance: his eyes bulging with silent resentment, his body seething with the effort of maintaining an outer control forever at odds with his inner monologue. This is a man relegated so often to existing within the shadows of others more celebrated than himself that he has made himself at home in the darkness. A man resigned to pulling others down to his level rather than continuing to strive for an elevation that will never come. A man who is ultimately competing against himself: not Othello. And all the more dangerous for it.
And John Douglas Thompson’s Othello is all to ripe for the psychological picking: a gentle heart within a soldier’s frame, much given to whimsy and sentiment, finally at peace within his private life but with ghosts never far from remembrance. His countenance is open and friendly; puzzled as to how objections to his marriage can come in tandem with praise of his exploits; professional to his fingertips even when a personal friendship is at stake.
There is strong support too from Edward Hogg as the decent but hapless Cassio; and Jethro Skinner as Roderigo, the useful prat every plotter needs to further their ambitions. James Oxley’s vocal arrangements haunt the piece almost as another character: the heaviness and gorgeosity of Orthodox liturgy redolent of the white, male, Christian expectations which swirl around and eventually suffocate the fated union. These voices are a stunning addition to the piece, expanding emotional density and packing much of the necessary punch occasionally lacking in textual delivery and within the stylised violence.
The pace of the piece never dips for a second, as the horribly ordinary cloak of jealousy envelops and unravels its targets as surely as canal mists engulf their Venetian streets.
