Othello

of what happens behind the locked doors of a marriage gone wrong.MA: One of the challenging elements in designing Shakespeare is that he wrote for a nonscenic theater, and therefore saw sequences following quickly, one after the other, changing location very swiftly. I remember Cicely Berry saying once,“There’s no pause in Shakespeare until the end of the play.” We tried very hard to keep the flow of things, so both Venice and Cyprus were quite spare; consequently, if you introduced an item of scenery it really had an effect.For Venice I wanted something quite magisterial and formal, not particularly decorative. I wasn’t concerned with a literal representation of Venice so it wasn’t very beautiful; rather it was elegant and spare. If I were to put another adjective to it, it would be masculine. The scene where Othello persuades the Duke and the Senators to accept the marriage was very formal. We chose early twentieth-century costumes because, like Trevor [Nunn], I felt that the military context was very important. The Duke and Brabantio were like the formal elders of Venice, in frock coats and in an elegant, very male setting, with a big long table, inkwells, and blotters: quite starchy.In Cyprus, although the setting is an army camp, it is much more sensual. So we wanted heat and light as opposed to coolness and elegance. I wanted something that evoked a camp, so there was no architecture. Robert Jones [the designer] had these canvas panels that came in and out so that you could completely shutter off the upstage area, or open the whole stage up. It could configure into different arrangements that would give you different locations. The great benefits of what he did were twofold. One, it was in quite a gentle, warm color that made it feel very sensual. If you backlit it you could perform shadow-play behind it. The other thing was that it seemed to me that there are several stunning moments in the play where you go from an incredibly intense and intimate scene into one where suddenly everyone is present: for example, Act 4 Scene 1, which begins with Othello and Iago, where Othello is absolutely losing his mind. Lodovico arrives with news from Venice and suddenly the stage is flooded with soldiers. It’s the scene in which he eventually slaps Desdemona. So from that intimate, awful, ferocious, locking-antlers quality which Othello and Iago have, suddenly everything flew out and we were in a public place and Othello was on public show; he was the army commander, and he was expected to act in a particular way and yet he was clearly cracking up. This places the audience in the position of being in on a secret about Othello’s internal life which the other characters aren’t aware of. That feeling of being able to go from a two-handed scene to a twelve- or fifteen-handed scene, at the click of a light switch, was really important.I also felt it was important that you got a strong sense of Emilia and, particularly, Desdemona being fishes out of water in Cyprus; that they shouldn’t, strictly speaking, really be there. So, for example, when Desdemona landed in Cyprus, she arrived with half a dozen hatboxes. She was an elegant, urban girl with a lot of money. It’s hot; there are a lot of soldiers, with sweat under their arms, and this girl arrives as if she’s gone to the Mediterranean on holiday! I wanted the increasing feeling that she didn’t know what to do with herself at the formal arrival in Cyprus. Should she join the parade? Should she watch the parade? During that wonderful scene where there’s the riot in the middle of the night, we played it that Othello and Desdemona were trying to consummate their marriage and are interrupted and he has to get up. He arrives bare-chested, holding a sword, and he’s clearly been disturbed from his love life. And she comes on covered by a sheet and all the men suddenly become aware that there’s a half-naked woman there. She was out of place. So although it was a very sensual place it was not there to accommodate sophisticated, well-dressed, wealthy, urban girls.

T. S. Eliot famously read Othello’s farewell speech (“Soft you; a word…”) as a deluded man cheering himself up. That’s a bit harsh, isn’t it? But on the other hand, there is an element of Othello, after having been stripped bare (“goats and monkeys,” “that common whore of Venice,” and all that), now protecting his image once again with the carapace of his poetic music?MA: I think that’s actually a half- truth. Yes, there’s no question that his assessment of what has happened is going to be different from ours. We wouldn’t appraise it in the same way. But I don’t think that necessarily means he is twisting the truth in a cynical or manipulative way. If you feel life draining out of you then you will say things that aren’t necessarily going to be gospel truth. But I do think that a lot of what he says in that last speech is true. In a way, what is awful about it is not the reconstruction of his image, but his bewilderment as his mind races. Othello actually says very little in that last scene. He is like a spectator. Now he has learned what really happened, he has to reassess reality. So the scale of what’s happening in his head when his life is draining away is colossal. I don’t think it’s anything manipulative or vain. I think it’s a man in a state of complete incomprehension and bewilderment. Like centuries of people since, he’s trying to work out why it happened. And Iago gives nothing away; he takes his secret to the grave. It’s a very hard speech to generalize about. It’s actually a man trying to find truth.

ANTONY SHER ON PLAYING IAGOSir Antony Sher was born in Cape Town in 1949. After compulsory military service in South Africa, he traveled to London to train as an actor. He joined the Liverpool Everyman Theatre in the 1970s, working with a group of gifted young actors and writers that included Willy Russell, Alan Bleasdale, Julie Walters, Trevor Eve, and Jonathan Pryce, playing Ringo in Willy Russell’s John, Paul, George, Ringo…& Bert. He joined the RSC in 1982 and played the title role in Tartuffe and the Fool in King Lear. In 1984 he won the prestigious Laurence Olivier Award for his performance in the RSC’s Richard III. Since then he has played numerous leading roles in the theater as well as on film and television, including Tamburlaine, Cyrano de Bergerac, and Macbeth, as well as Shylock in The Merchant of Venice and Iago in the RSC’s 2004 Othello at the Swan Theatre directed by Gregory Doran, which he discusses here. He also writes books and plays, including the theatrical memoirs Year of the King (1985) and Woza Shakespeare: Titus Andronicus in South Africa (1997, cowritten with his partner Gregory Doran).

The play is called Othello and yet Iago’s is the largest part. Does that somehow make the role different from Macbeth or Richard III or Hamlet or Lear, where the journey of the lead actor and that of the play are the same?I don’t think it matters that the play is called Othello, yet Iago is the larger role—the piece is structured as a thrilling combat between two heavyweights. Iago may be the instigator of the fight, and Othello the victim, yet the two men become locked together in a deadly hold, dragging each other down to destruction. And so they share, equally, the journey of the play.

Unlike most of the big Shakespearean roles, Iago’s contains a large measure of prose as opposed to verse: is there something distinctive about inhabiting a prose mind?The fact that a large amount of Iago’s dialogue is written in prose became very useful to our setting of the play, which was a military base on Cyprus, mid-twentieth century. In this context Iago was a recognizably modern NCO figure—a rough-talking square-basher, a master of barrack-room banter, and one who knows when to break open the bottles and start the songs, a veteran serviceman, immensely popular with the troops, and, to the rest of the world, just “honest Iago.” This interpretation was much more available in prose than it would’ve been in verse.

Iago’s language is full of sexual imagery throughout the play. How much of a clue to his character does that give you?Iago can’t seem to open his mouth without some sexual allusion spilling out. You could argue that this is just the way soldiers talk, but there’s something odder, more perverse in Iago’s language. To him, having sexual intercourse is “making the beast with two backs.” Why this savage image? Perhaps a clue comes in his speech about Desdemona: “Now, I do love her too, / Not out of absolute lust—though peradventure / I stand accountant for as great a sin.” Why does Iago have to reassure us that he could be lustful if he chose? We wouldn’t expect anything less of this supremely macho man. Is it that he’s impotent, and physically incapable of making the “beast with two backs”? Or is he sterile? Could these things account for his strange energy, his appetite for chaos, his nihilism? I’m not sure. I certainly based my portrayal on the idea of a man with a severe sexual hang-up, though I rather liked leaving this undefined.

Does Iago lie to the audience? Are we really supposed to believe his accusations about both Othello and Cassio cuckolding him? I don’t believe that Iago lies to the audience in his soliloquies. When he suggests that both Othello and Cassio have slept with his wife, Emilia, he thinks it’s true, so it’s no more like lying than Leontes’ accusations about Hermione’s fidelity in The Winter’s Tale. In fact, having previously played Leontes, I believe he and Iago are suffering from the same condition; medically it’s known as morbid or sexual jealousy, when someone becomes convinced, falsely, that their partner is betraying them. This possibility was enhanced in our production by Amanda Harris playing Emilia as a boozy, flirty army wife. We all felt that although the play is famously about one man consumed with jealousy, it’s actually about two. Iago seems as much under the spell of the “green-eyed monster” as is the Moor. I think the reason that Iago is so successful at duping Othello is that Iago knows about jealousy from deep within.“O, beware, my lord, of jealousy,” he says with real feeling. Earlier, talking of his suspicion that Othello has slept with Emilia, he says “the thought whereof / Doth—like a poisonous mineral —gnaw my inwards.” Iago is like a man with a highly contagious disease, who is determined to pass on the germs.