Amazing news at the National. Nicholas Hytner has invented a time machine that can bring Shakespeare to bumpkins who’ve never bothered to read him. His up-to-date Othello begins with Venice’s powerful élite dressed in two-piece suits, like Manchester Utd on tour, and striding around a war-room plotting military action against ‘the Turk’. In Act II, Othello and his task force are choppered out to Cyprus where a heavily fortified compound is ready and waiting for them. Crikey. Looks as though they conquered the enemy and built Camp Bastion in 24 hours flat. Fast work, chaps.
Othello’s squadron boasts two strange new recruits. Iago’s wife, Emilia, wears full British army uniform which, according to this show, is the correct costume for a Venetian aristocrat’s lady’s maid. Desdemona meanwhile sports a fusion of styles. Her flak jacket and helmet indicate membership of a British infantry regiment while her turquoise rucksack hints at a UN role, possibly as Breast Cancer Awareness Ambassador, like Geri Halliwell. Monstrosities pile up on all sides. Because modern soldiery is sabre-free, Othello’s tremendous line — ‘Keep up your bright swords for the dew will rust them’ — is translated into wet-fish Homeric pastiche: ‘Hold your hands’. The scene where Othello misconstrues Cassio’s comments about Bianca as sexual ribaldries about Desdemona is performed in an army toilet. Othello has to deliver piteous, heart-rending lines while popping up and down from behind a cubicle. The immortal last scene is played out in a squaddie’s bedsit with Ikea wardrobes and a second-hand bed flung in one corner. It might have been resting on bricks. I couldn’t quite see.
Stuck in the wrong century, the show has to disregard Shakespeare’s delicate and exquisitely balanced use of social history. In the outer plot, Christian Venice hires a Muslim war hero to defeat a Muslim army. In the inner plot, a Venetian lieutenant misuses Venice’s liberalism to defeat the same Muslim war hero. This incomparable store of subtlety and irony is destroyed by Hytner’s glib and wilful parochialism. Amazingly, much of the play survives his assault. Adrian Lester’s beautifully spoken Othello is a mass of contradictions and non-sequiturs, all shrewdly chosen. Lester reaches straight for the ill humour, the ugliness and the violence of Othello. Early on, he grabs Iago in a headlock and nearly snaps his neck in two. Danger and paranoia lurk just beneath the eloquence and the charisma. He captures the lyricism and the romantic mystery of the character too, as well as the perverse sexiness. He sniffs at the hair-scent of a half-dead Desdemona with a horrible, captivating sensuality. This is one of the great Othellos.
Rory Kinnear, a remote and elusive actor, takes Iago in one direction only and plays him as a boo-hiss trickster with dodges galore tucked up his sleeve. This is a cool, constricted Iago whose open-hearted honesty, attested to by every character but Emilia, doesn’t come across at all. Newcomer Olivia Vinall performs Desdemona as a lads’-mag lightweight, which is presumably what she was told to do. At least she’s the right age. Lyndsey Marshal, far too young for the jaded and worldly Mrs Iago, gives a stirring account of the play’s unlikely avenger. As always with this timeless script, the final half-hour thrilled me to the core. But this was despite the production, not because of it. If art has any function it’s to make the transitory permanent. This makes the permanent transitory.
More army shenanigans at the Soho. Glory Dazed by Cat Jones begins on a note of brilliant and naturalistic uncertainty. Lights go up. We’re in an empty pub. Three characters stand motionless, shooting glances at each other, and pretending not to be there, while outside a madman hammers at the door and demands admission. The madman is Ray, a brutalised serviceman just back from Afghanistan, who wants to claim his ex-wife Carla from her weedy new boyfriend. Ray is covered in blood having just half-murdered a casual drinker in a nearby boozer. The man’s crime? He flipped channels during a live screening of a Wootton Bassett funeral.
This intense, rage-filled play speaks readily to modern audiences and offers a devastating character study of a bloodthirsty thug encouraged by the state to convert his violence into virtuous patriotism. There are distinct Greek echoes as well. Ray is a faithful Odysseus come back to seduce his wavering Penelope. He’s also Agamemnon, a braggart conqueror driven insane with lust and arrogance, who expects obedience from his prostrate loved ones. In Elle While’s gripping production, Samuel Edward-Cook delivers a sensational performance as the lumbering, sweat-stained human gorilla, Ray. Chloe Massey offers great support as the indecisive sexpot Carla, who fears and worships her ungovernable husband in equal measure. As the curtain fell, the audience whooped with astonished delight at a play that reaches so deeply into the troubled heart of a hired killer. Exhilarating stuff.
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