Desdemona the daughter about this interpretation. Her teasing and cajoling manner is that of a favourite young girl playing up to her daddy. As well as emphasising the generation gap, it helps Iago when he opportunistically reminds Othello how she was false to her father in Venice in order to get away from his arms.83hurling herself prematurely into an adult world, [Desdemona] is fragile, lovely, spoilt, manipulatively aware of her charm, and very young…On the quayside, waiting for Othello, her flippant exchanges with Iago reveal a deep uncertainty as to how a married woman ought to behave under such circumstance, and end in tears.84The development of the relationship between Desdemona and Zoe Wanamaker’s Emilia in this production was given an added depth, poignancy, and focus. Traditionally, she is portrayed as the “warm, motherly Emilia,”85 but more recent productions have cast women with less of an age difference in the two roles. In 1989, the two women started out as strangers, Emilia being reluctantly assigned to the task of companion-cum-maid. This made better sense of the fact that Emilia doesn’t admit to Desdemona that the handkerchief has been taken:[She] seemed to be jealous of a relationship which made her acutely aware of the inadequacy of her own marriage. When Emilia denies to Desdemona any knowledge of what has happened to the handkerchief, it can be an uncomfortable moment inconsistent with loyal friendship, but for Zoe Wanamaker it read powerfully as a moment in which she was prepared to have Desdemona suffer a little of the marital disharmony that for Emilia was habitual.86The willow song scene acted as a breaking down of the divisions between the two women. At first reluctant to emotionally engage with this inexperienced girl, even pushing her arms from her when Desdemona hugs her for comfort, their shared experience betrayed a developing bond. In a clever piece of directing, the two women were linked in the final scenes by combining their voices. After smothering Desdemona with his hand, Willard White’s Othello lay back on the bed, distraught. Outside Emilia was heard calling gently “My lord, my lord.” In a voice almost spectral in its urgency and tone, Othello believed that he was hearing Desdemona’s voice, took the pillow and then smothered her again. As Desdemona struggled to utter her last words, Emilia helped her by completing her sentences.87She berates Othello and as her own culpability is revealed she displays remarkable courage and moral strength. For Zoe Wanamaker, this was all the more powerful because of the absence of any easy sentimentality in her earlier relationship with Desdemona.88Significantly, Emilia was left dead on the floor, ignored by those present, with no word of her sacrifice.
A Mind DiseasedOn playing the role of Iago, David Suchet commented:Actors seem to have latched on to one quality and played that—the smiling villain, the devil’s agent, the latent homosexual. Or you get the cold, objective playwright Iago, the one who creates the action. One thing I have discovered this first week is that any of those interpretations will work—up to a certain point. Then it would be a struggle to maintain it for the rest of the play. Studying the text very carefully one notices that Shakespeare himself has not got a clear line on Iago. If he had, it would be clear.89Shakespeare endows Iago with a psychological condition beyond most people’s understanding. He gives no clear line with him because there is no clear line with a self-absorbed psychotic. The audience is taken on a disturbing journey into the mind of someone suffering a mental disturbance, and is left with the realization that the only genuine reason for his behavior lies in his own twisted nature, which is unfathomable. Actors playing Iago have picked up on certain elements of character that are evident in the text to give themselves an accessible psychological route into this dark void of a man.Like many real-life serial killers, he shows one face to the world while being a completely different character underneath. He wishes to tear apart all that is beautiful, pure, and honorable. Bob Peck, who played the part in 1979, stated that Iago, completely aware of his own corruption,seems to me to be a man whose life of deception and fraud is so repugnant to him that he can’t bear to see virtue, compassion, love or anything of positive moral good in others.90Iago is a man who has structured his life on the principle that human beings are merely animals. For him, words like “nobility,” “honour,” “self-sacrifice” and “love” are shams…And yet Iago is not quite secure in his cynicism. Styles of life which argue against him constitute a personal affront. In order to preserve his own self-respect, to avoid becoming ugly even in his own eyes, he must either prove that they are hypocritical, or else destroy them. This is why he needs to turn Desdemona’s virtue into pitch, to make Cassio drunk, and to drag Othello down until he is speaking Iago’s characteristic language of “goats and monkeys” instead of his own.91Bob Peck’s performance had picked up on the image of the tough, reliable, and jovial NCO. Like most modern Iagos, he spoke with a regional accent to indicate his class—and another reason for hatred:Far from being an incarnation of motiveless malice, he is intensely jealous, crudely ambitious and utterly callous, a hate machine created by the slow, dehumanising process of professional warfare.92He played the part with far more humor than usual, involving the audience and chuckling over his achievements, setting himself up from the start as the arch manipulator:During Iago’s first major soliloquy, the one where he sets up the plan to destroy Othello and his rather shaky alibi for so doing, [Ronald] Eyre has the other four principals concerned. Emilia, Desdemona, Cassio and the Moor himself line up silently on stage behind him, so that Iago may view them almost as if they were waxworks before arranging them into his evil patterns.93Iagos have varied enormously, but they remain constant in their emphasis on one thing—sexual jealousy. Richard McCabe pointed out:Iago’s psychosis runs far deeper than mere ambition…Here is a man consumed by professional and personal jealousy to the point of destruction.94When comforting Desdemona in Act 4 Scene 2, McCabe’s Iago held her in his arms:the more I played the sympathetic uncle figure, the more repulsive it became…The effect on my Iago, though, was devastating…Many killers prefer not to think of their victims as real human beings as this can trigger a moral sense within them. So I let out a gasp, contorted my body from its customary ramrod erectness, and turned upstage as if to hide the effect my internal conflict was revealing…95Similarly, in 1989, Ian McKellen rocked Desdemona gently in his arms and stroked her hair as if taking some perverse sexual pleasure from touching the wife of his enemy.In 2004, Antony Sher’s Iago,when briefly alone in Desdemona’s dressing room… stealthily kisses a dress hanging in her wardrobe trunk. Women and their sexuality are fascinating, but alien and threatening…96Conversely, in 1985, David Suchet followeda Freudian line by implying Iago is deeply in love with Othello and manically jealous of Desdemona. Instead of gloating over the pole-axed, epileptic hero, he stands over him stroking his hair and urging him on to virile revenge… giving us a deeply masculine homosexual prone to sudden, terrifying glimpses into his own iniquity: when he cries “Men should be what they seem / Or those that be not, would they might seem none” he stops short like a man who has peered into the abyss.97He suggesteda deep vein of fellow feeling with his commander, as if he sought to educate him in manly detachment. It is a deeply human reading of a deeply inhuman character.98at the death of Othello he makes a last impulsive gesture to embrace the corpse before letting his head fall, as though his own life has now run out…the Satanic element has been suppressed in pursuit of an explanation not really supplied by the text.99Suchet here again broke with tradition, surprising his audience who expected to see the stony-faced or gloating Iago at the end of the play, demonstrating no remorse or regret, unreadable to the last. In 1989 the effect of Iago’s final stare left the audience chilled with the conviction that they were in the company of a complete sociopath:here is an arresting final image of the pinioned Iago gazing down on the death-loaded bed, not with any hint of snickering triumph but with a blank astonishment at the havoc he has created. There is no hint of pity. Instead Ian McKellen’s countenance suggests the inhuman detachment and moral vacuum of the murderer surveying his victims.100
THE DIRECTOR’s CUT: INTERVIEWS WITH TREVOR NUNN AND MICHAEL ATTENBOROUGHSir Trevor Nunn is the most successful and one of the most highly regarded of modern British theater directors. Born in 1940, he was a brilliant student at Cambridge, strongly influenced by the literary close reading of Dr. F. R. Leavis. At the age of just twenty-eight he succeeded Peter Hall as artistic director of the RSC, where he remained until 1978. He greatly expanded the range of the company’s work and its ambition in terms of venues and touring. He also achieved huge success in musical theater and subsequently became artistic director of the National Theatre in London. His productions are always full of textual insights, while being clean and elegant in design. Among his most admired Shakespearean work has been a series of tragedies with Ian McKellen in leading roles: Macbeth (1976, with Judi Dench, in the dark, intimate space of The Other Place), Othello (1989, with McKellen as Iago and Imogen Stubbs as Desdemona), discussed here, and King Lear (2007, in the Stratford Complete Works Festival, on world tour, and then in London).Michael Attenborough, born in 1950 to a distinguished theatrical family, graduated from Sussex University in 1972 and worked as associate director at the Mercury Theatre, Colchester, from 1972 to 1974. He was artistic director of the Leeds (now West Yorkshire) Playhouse from 1974 to 1979, associate director of the Young Vic from 1979 to 1980, artistic director of the Palace Theatre, Watford, from 1980 to 1983, and director of the Hampstead Theatre from 1984 to 1989, which won twenty-three awards during his tenure. In 1989 he was appointed artistic director of the Turnstyle Group in the West End and then, in 1990, resident
