REVIEW: Concepts rob tension from Othello at the RSC, two stars **
Othello, RST, Stratford, until 14th November, Two stars **
Safe to say that most people who care about these kind of things are likely to be of the opinion that there are few, if any, wordsmiths working today who can hold a candle to Shakespeare. One marked exception, though, might be Bob Dylan.
Which is tremendously convenient for the purposes of this review as on 12th November 2008, during Series 3 of his Theme Time Radio Hour, Dylan presented a show full of songs about blood. One of the numbers he chose to play was called Lust Of The Blood, a bootleg rehearsal recording – one of only two surviving – from Catch My Soul, a musical based on Othello that was staged briefly in Los Angeles in 1968. The show was created by genius rock’n’roll impresario Jack Good and the singer of the song was Jerry Lee Lewis who was cast as Iago.
“If ever anybody ever asks me why I do this radio show,” Dylan enthused when the track had finished,” I could just play them that – Jerry Lee Lewis singing Shakespeare. That’s what this show is all about.”
According to reports from the time, Lewis completely owned Catch My Soul because, in playing Iago, he was simply playing himself. Directors, actors, audiences et al tend to approach the Iago character like detectives, seeking to solve the puzzle of why he does what he does. The list of motivations runs long. There’s naked envy – Iago is not as high-class or privileged as the others. He feels slighted for being overlooked by his boss Othello for a job - promotion and now wants revenge. Then there’s all the nasty racism that he exhibits because he considers Othello, being black, his natural inferior. Plus, he’s in love with Othello’s wife Desdemona. Plus, he’s not as handsome as Othello’s newly chosen second-in-command Cassio. Plus, he thinks Othello, and maybe Cassio, may have slept with his wife, Emilia. Plus, in some productions, Iago is portrayed as carrying a bit of a gay torch for Othello himself and is thus jealous that his boss has recently married. Plus, there’s the supernatural theory – y’know, maybe he's an agent of the devil sent to do Satan’s wicked handiwork.
Apparently, Lewis disregarded all of this. He needed no motivation whatsoever for his dreadful behaviour. Lewis was an unashamedly contradictory violent, lying, cheating, hell-raising, bible-thumping nasty piece of work who did what he liked cos he liked it. That’s who he was and what he did because, y’know, some folks are just wired that way That’s all there was to it. In fact, Lewis’ Iago was so Lewis that one night on stage he proclaimed, “Great balls of fire! My friend Roderigo!”
Lewis’ Iago was larger than life and unrepentant because why shouldn’t he be? And he quit the show after six weeks because he got bored. The RSC’s latest Iago, on the other hand, is somewhat a lesser creature. Played with an exaggerated and ultimately tiresome array of twitching, scratching, writhing, squirming and eyeball rolling, a veritable torso of nervous tics, Will Keen’s Iago seems crushed under the mountainous menu of motives that Shakespeare serves up. More maggot than man, he comes across as somewhat pathetic, as sinned against as sinning, snide more than anything.
Now, every schoolkid knows that the play should have been named after Iago as he drives the narrative but I’m afraid John Douglas Thompson does little with his Othello to stake any claim that the title’s rightfully his. His performance is deeply traditional, old-fashioned even, and by-the-book stiff, his passion theatrical rather than convincing. It feels as if – and this is true of the whole cast actually – he’s seen too many years to deliver all the lusty stuff.
Not that he’s helped by the puffy pants he’s been made to wear. A little research reveals they’re called pumpkin breeches but whatever their rightful name, there’s no getting away from the fact that they’re bloomers of such comedic impact that not even the greatest actor who ever lived could carry them off and be taken seriously as an esteemed warlord. I’m not sure what the thinking was behind festooning the male derrieres in these fabric balloons but one was tempted to assume that, as some were pumped-up and some more wilted, that they were meant to have some sort of symbolic relationship with each individual’s virility.
The wearing of the pantaloons is not the production’s only troubling aspect. Othello is a long play – nigh-on three hours – mostly packed with speaking rather than doing anything so when the climax arrives and we get the opportunity to witness some action, director Tim Carroll has taken the unforgivable decision to rob us of our reward. The fatal sword fight between Edward Hogg’s Cassio and Jethro Skinner’s Roderigo is inexplicably played out as some sort of tableau, the two never actually coming to blows so a scene that should be visceral is rendered as flat choreography. Worse still, just as Othello’s about to strangle Juliet Rylance’s Desdemona, the stage blacks out and the audience is left blind in pitch darkness as the murder is represented by a bunch of moans and groans. Again, what on earth was the thinking? Surely not a lack of confidence in the actors being able to deliver the full, hellish impact of the scene? One thing’s for sure, back in the bard’s time, a Tudor audience would have showered the stage with cabbages at being denied their brutal finale.
The cast, as I said, is uniformly “actorly” save for Colin Hurley’s Brabantio who finds some pathos in playing the disappointed father, and Anastasia Hille who delivers an unfussy and naturalistic Emilia.
Strangely, for a play about the fragility of relationships, this production seems to shy away from all intimacy. This is largely due to the employment of a “box” fashioned of stringed beads, like those things that used to pass as doors in 1970s hippie houses. It lowers from the ceiling rendering part-hidden some crucial scenes, most heinously when it serves as the marital bed-chamber. What it’s for and why it’s there is never made clear but the sight of Othello repeatedly sniffing at this curtain makes the Moor appear more pervy than pitiful. It’s a frustrating, unwelcome distraction. As is the uncalled-for choir. At the end, when Othello has stabbed himself to death (with a knife clumsily supplied him out of the blue by some anonymous bloke who just wanders on), the drama should be at its shattering peak but suddenly we’re being serenaded with something tuneful of a religious bent from the balcony and all atmospheric tension is instantly snuffed out.
Iago’s final speech - "Demand me nothing. What you know, you know. From this time forth I never will speak word" – makes total sense applied to his reported portrayal by Jerry Lee Lewis. You get what you got, suck it up. Not so much by Will Keen’s shivering, verbose wreck.
In refusing to explain himself, Lewis was delivering us a truth – that we are all deluded fools to think that such dreadful deeds need be driven by anything other than just being who we are. Keen is merely doing what the script instructs him.
When Anthony Sher played the RSC’s Iago in 2004, the last thing he did was to stare at the audience. Apparently, director Greg Doran intended this to be an enigmatic gesture, open to interpretation. But Sher later wrote that he did it because he was asking us: "You saw what was happening - why didn't you stop it?”
Considering the state of the world today, that’s a very good question.