FOR all Othello’s troubled brushes with uncomfortable racist views, male violence against women and the moral trickiness of us finding pleasure in fairly evil machinations, this production opts to sail well away from the wind and in truth makes no points at all.
There’s no contemporary slant to this production, nor is there an overt racial agenda or a political axe to grind. In such an uncomplicated environment the play’s poetry and action should be centre stage.
But the fall of a great strong-minded man, cleverly gulled into mistrusting and then killing his new wife somehow loses its way in a production which strives hard but fails to be truly memorable.
John Douglas Thompson’s Othello is about as far from a military commander as you could get. There’s no early hint of the decisiveness which will ultimately be undermined. Instead he is a confused, smiling man too ditheringly genial to garner fear or respect.
In a slightly comical twist he’s costumed in voluminous leather breeches accentuating his bandy creep around the stage to resemble a man who’s just suffered a protracted and uncomfortable bike ride. It’s a distinctly odd look which, despite some late-on declaiming, he never seems to rise above.
Will Keen’s Iago will certainly split opinion. Played as flat as it’s possible to go, there are perhaps traces of the everyday banality that makes evil so chilling. But stacked against any such case is a constant denial of any poetic rhythm and a frequent lack of audibility. At times the approach strays dangerously close to indolence and looks utterly at odds with any other, more conventional, performance in the cast.
In many ways it’s left to the women to give the show any semblance of depth and they don’t disappoint. Juliet Rylance provides a Desdemona perfectly balanced between obedience and justifiable despair. Excellent support comes too from Anastasia Hille as Emilia whose energy in the final moments keeps the whole thing afloat when ponderous staging looks like taking it under.
One pleasant surprise comes in the form of James Oxley’s musical score, a rich choral texture with a decidedly orthodox flavour given a spirited, haunting performance throughout.
The look of the production is fairly straightforward, Judith Bowden’s set provides little other than a well-used gauze curtain effect that adds a little visual relief to a fairly open, unadorned stage. There’s not a lot of spectacle or invention here.
Fights are kept to a minimum to the point where characters act out their own parts in the fray from individual pools of light. No touching, no choreography, no gore.
Perhaps the oddest omission in Tim Carroll’s staging is a sense of theatricality. Long sections are left to be played out with only the barest of movement, characters hardly ever seem to physically interact and – most bizarrely of all – the key murder of Desdemona takes Shakespeare’s immortal line of ‘putting out the light’ at face value and plunges the whole theatre into black leaving us with thuds and groans not unlike two people struggling a wardrobe across a stairwell when the push-button light fails.
There are clear indications of intent and thought in this production but the lack of theatricality and the underpowered delivery stand in the way of genuine success.
