Othello

sight of the pain that can ultimately be only personal.⁶⁰Ralph Koltai, designer of Terry Hands’ 1985 production, went for a minimalist interpretation. The characters were in Elizabethan dress, but the setting consisted of a black stage with “smoked-perspex screens edged with gold,”⁶¹ behind which sat “sculptural emblems of a Cypriot crucifix later replaced by a dangerously resting gold lion,”⁶² an emblem of Venetian imperialism.There is little stage furniture, scarcely any attempt at social realism. A few flickers of light on the back wall suggest Venice; the storm that marks Othello’s arrival at Cyprus, brilliantly taking its cue in a welcome suggestion of diabolism from Iago’s “Hell and night / Must bring this monstrous birth to the world’s light,” is the only big production number: lights blindingly flash, the noises of thunder are theatrical rather than natural. The overall effect of the design … is to release the play from local associations and to put the focus very much on the actors, who perform urgently, with a high degree of psychological realism.⁶³Starting with John Barton in 1971, most recent productions have emphasized the military setting of the play. Thus the public element remains without taking away from the intimacy of the action. With this genuine sense of army life we get important distinctions in rank from costume, rules of conduct influencing characters’ behavior, and the isolating effect of the army barracks on Desdemona.Julia Trevelyan Oman, designer of the 1971 production set in the nineteenth century, was influenced by early war photographs from the Crimea and American Civil War:They represent the past, but the near past, and the uniforms and background details still have a poignant reality and emotional appeal for us…I see Cyprus as a remote dusty army outpost cut off from civilisation, and Othello himself as a soldier as different in manner and dress from the other professionals in his army as Napoleon or Rommel from theirs.⁶⁴In this barrack atmosphere, heavy with the celibate fantasies of men herded together in heat, it’s easy to understand why Othello should trust his senior NCO more than his new bride from home; how jealousy might crackle through his imagination like fire through a dry thorn-bush. Meaning is restored to the play’s talk of honour, reputation. Where else, today, but in the Army could we accept a drunken fight spelling disgrace for Cassio or a man regarding his wife’s infidelity as the ruin of his career?⁶⁵Michael Attenborough’s 1999 production used an Edwardian militaristic world with special attention paid to the inevitable tensions and jealousies of army life:Cyprus feels like a British colonial outpost with soldiers in red tunics, Desdemona in a muslin dress and army bands playing in the distance: as in Much Ado, it strikes me that Shakespeare understood the peculiar danger of the aftermath of conflict when leisure afternoons are filled with malice and mischief…it is the military context that gives resonance to [Richard] McCabe’s wonderfully observed Iago…When Cassio taunts him with the fact that the lieutenant must be saved before the ensign, you see a look of pure hate, quickly masked, flash across McCabe’s eyes….⁶⁶Stephen Brimson Lewis’ set in 2004 intensified the sense of claustrophobia in the play by having “a framework of rusting, corrugated iron and a wire fence, [which] vividly suggests a decaying end of empire location, a military stockade behind which Othello and his men retreat.”⁶⁷The army barracks become a microcosm of Venetian life isolated within enemy territory. Trevor Nunn’s production in 1989 also hinted at the tensions outside the barrack walls:… costumed by Bob Crowley in a style suggestive of Chekhov crossed with the American Civil War…Watch-dogs bark, clocks chime, while in Cyprus—a place, we are reminded, with larger racial tensions of its own—the cicadas are periodically silenced not only by distant church music, but the muezzin’s call to prayer.⁶⁸The influence of the military on personality was vividly demonstrated in Trevor Nunn’s 1989 production, performed in the intensity of a studio theater, The Other Place:Cyprus is clearly defined as a simmering colonial outpost where the women fuss over the barley-water while the men get on with post-war admin…[Ian] McKellen [as Iago] is the absolute embodiment of the professional soldier: every detail is correct down to the little baccy-tin for half-smoked cheroots and the obsessive way he tidies his barrack-room blankets.⁶⁹McKellen’s performance in 1989 was noted for this fastidiousness born out of army life:Psychotically unable to tolerate disorder, Iago is perpetually tidying up the barracks, righting overturned chairs, pouncing on the litter. For this “model” NCO, the marriage of Desdemona and black Othello, an even more conspicuous irregularity in his world, naturally demands eradicating too…Unsmiling, the least jocular of Iagos, McKellen establishes no rapport with the audience—something of a feat in The Other Place—let alone the usual sense of complicity. In this terrifying performance, asides, like soliloquies, are private, echoing inside the desert of his head.⁷⁰This militarism and precision of Iago’s devices is what makes the man so chilling. In 2004, Antony Sher’sknowing, nudging, darkly funny performance invites us to appreciate the intricate mechanics of destruction. And in his modern khaki his Iago looks like a chunky, florid blend of an Afrikaner cop and the moustached Hitler; but nobody could more subtly use concern, helpfulness, moral indignation and blunt soldierly decency to lure a man and a marriage on to the rocks. It’s awful and it’s impressive.⁷¹

A Woman’s PlaceIn a military world the role of women is marginalized, although clearly defined. As in John Barton’s 1971 production, the effect is toisolate and make Desdemona more vulnerable, and the innate brutality of the play more obviously naturalistic.⁷²The daily life of an army on active service is as foreign and exotic to Desdemona as is her new-made lord. Any support from family, friends and the only society she has known as a gently-nurtured aristocratic girl is removed from her by her voyage to Cyprus, leaving her with only the intimacy of Emilia, whose allegiance is at least partially to her husband. Of course, to Othello the camp has always been the centre of his existence; but this particular camp environment is rendered unfamiliar by the presence of a wife.⁷³Women are by definition excluded from the battlefield and barracks. Kept in the bedroom and at the dinner table, they share neither the same experiences nor the same intimacies. No wonder the husbands…relate more intensely to their fellows than to their wives.⁷⁴In 2004, Greg Doran createda predominantly male, militaristic society in which women are either romanticised or treated as whores. Lisa Dillon’s fragile, loyal, indisputably loving Desdemona wanders into this world like a rose waiting to be crushed. And Amanda Harris’s Emilia…is a perfect portrayal of the hardened service wife who has long learned to adjust to this brutal male ethos.⁷⁵The attitude toward women was portrayed as disturbingly misogynist:The Venetian soldiers…are so sloppily dressed they look as if they’d have trouble controlling Mykonos, let alone Cyprus; but they’re a nasty lot, who punch Nathalie Armin’s harmless Bianca and push around the Islamic women who gather on cushions at the front of the stage or lurk behind steel netting at its rear.⁷⁶This issue of Iago’s repulsion toward physical contact with his wife has been played as disgust at her supposed infidelity, and as a homosexual leaning, but is also indicative of the redundancy of these women in a man’s world. Michael Attenborough’s attention to this fact was highly praised when he directed Othello in 1999:The virtue of this production is that it creates a militaristic world where women’s needs and desires go unrecognised: the drinking-scene, in particular, is beautifully staged with the men engaging in bizarre quasi- homosexual rituals. And part of Iago’s tragedy is that he is so much a creature of this world that he sees women as little more than sexual objects waiting to be crushed.⁷⁷Of course, Iago is severely psychologically twisted; his view of everyone, but especially women, rancid with images of bestiality. One instantly pities Emilia. In 2004, what incited Antony Sher’s Iago wasa disgusted fascination with sex. Amanda Harris’s excellent Emilia, his embittered wife, repels him so much that his fingers move into strangling mode before they readjust into shoulder massage.⁷⁸His jealousy of Emilia is only proprietorial. Here…Harris’s performance brilliantly fills in the picture. She is tense and tired, smokes nervously, takes the odd tipple and is clearly bored to the gills with Iago’s wise-guy joviality and heavy-handed sex jokes. In this marriage, she is an object, but a dangerous object: at the end Iago stabs her in the genitals.⁷⁹In 1985:The Emilia of Janet Dale is a marvellous study in rejected sexuality, canoodling her way for a fleet moment into Iago’s favour with the procured handkerchief only to find herself spun from the embrace in a premonition of [Ben] Kingsley’s “turn, turn, turn” humiliation of Desdemona which leads to a truly shocking slap on the face.⁸⁰At the beginning of the play, Othello’s demonstrative affection for his new bride distinctly marks out his behavior as different from the rest of his command. In 1999:Military discipline and ceremonial are the facade cracked open by Othello’s infatuation with Desdemona. The obliviousness of Fearon’s Othello to the embarrassment of Lieutenant Cassio (Henry Ian Cusick) at his hungry fondlings of Desdemona on the quayside makes it more than usually credible that he should be so blind to Iago.⁸¹As Iago’s poison works on Othello we see his behavior and language toward women change. Othello physically demonstrates the bestial behavior which Iago only thinks and talks about. They become two sides of the same jealous monster. In 1979:Sinden conveys the ecstasy of jealousy with splendid conviction. At one point he is reduced to emptying his wife’s laundry basket and sniffing the sheets for evidence of copulation. And he carries the humiliation of Desdemona further than I have ever seen by threatening to tup her in front of Emilia and by hurling her contemptuously to the ground in front of the Venetian visitors.⁸²Shakespeare presents us with two women at either end of the scale, one who has suffered at the hands of a brute, and is worldly-wise through her experiences as both abused and army wife, and one new to that lifestyle and marriage. Imogen Stubbs as Desdemona in Trevor Nunn’s production was very girlish in nature:There is an apt sense of