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Escape into silence

Kate Chisholm

Wednesday, 7th May 2008

Cigarettes and Chocolate (Radio 4); Othello (Radio 3)

Next day if you’d had almost three hours with nothing to do except sit and listen you could have been witness to an extraordinary performance of Othello on Radio Three. The Radio Times this week wondered whether it was ever possible for Shakespeare to work on radio. It seemed like a daft question to me. Surely, Shakespeare’s plays are so important to us not so much because of what actually takes place on stage but in the incredible way in which he puts words together. It’s not stagecraft that counts, but the delivery of those speeches, those riffs and self-reflections. And listening on radio is a brilliant way to really hear them, to appreciate fully the sheer variety of pace and tone and language, from Othello’s tellingly simple ‘But yet the pity of it, Iago! O! Iago, the pity of it, Iago!’ to that wonderfully evocative, ‘of one whose subdu’d eyes/ Albeit unused to the melting mood, Drop tears as fast as the Arabian trees/ Their med’cinable gum.’

I must say I found it very hard to sit myself down in an armchair and truly to listen for all that time without nipping upstairs or foraging in the kitchen. But it was worth the effort. I heard so much more by not being distracted by the rich brocade and choreographed movement, and discovered all kinds of other currents running through the play which before I have never really noticed. Partly I think this was because the performance was not made for radio but was adapted (by Penny Leicester) from the award-winning production at the Donmar Warehouse, with Chiwetel Ejiofor as Othello and Ewan McGregor as Iago.

This was a cast who had acted the play together many times and knew their lines from memory. No one had to read them, but could speak them from the heart. There was a quite different power to their delivery than in a usual play for radio, and a distinctive quality to their timing and interaction, so that it was much easier to observe for instance how often the words ‘honest’, ‘pity’, ‘jealousy’ are repeated by all the characters; how at the beginning terrible things are said about the Moor’s blackness, his difference, his absolute inappropriateness as a husband for Desdemona. You did not have to see them acting together to feel the tension that was being generated between them. And even if at times it was difficult to tell who was stabbing whom, it didn’t really matter. If only Gemma could have heard it, perhaps she would have regained her faith in the remarkable flexibility and possibilities of the English language.