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Micky Jo (16:27)

Performances now first and foremost, and it's interesting to consider that he has played the role previously, some decades ago. I think David Harewood is a really first rate, terrific Othello. We meet him initially with a great sense of importance and status, and there is, to begin with, some interest in comparing his depiction alongside that of Iago. There is some difference in the way the two of them are attired that really sets him apart. The difference in posture between them, the difference in height between the two men. Iago is really established, I feel, as this sort of petty, resentful presence, one who could not challenge him on his own terms and so has to play all of the mind games that he already has in motion. There's also something interesting if we consider the pantomime logic of it all, with Iago sort of lingering to one side of the stage in his first entrance and David as Othello walking proudly and confidently down the center of the stage towards the audience. But this Othello is one who is firm, who is direct, has considerable gravitas, a man demonstrably not to be Cross, but also a man of honour, a man of reason and a man of, it seems, considerable emotional intelligence in the first few sort of decisions that he has to make and the conferences that he has has. This is Othello utterly ready for military leadership. And we get the sense that it's going to take some considerable doing to unravel him from the point where he starts, which is why it's so impressive where David eventually gets to. And there's some moments in the middle where we feel he's sort of a little too easily been undone by the vague suggestion that perhaps his wife and Cassio are maybe sharing a little bit too much time with each other. But where he gets to is such a fascinating lifetime away from the qualities that he had at the beginning, the journey that his Othello goes on, from this sort of almost presidential quality to a version of himself restored to this jealous, youthful, boyish quality, but also rendered emotionally helpless and distraught. He writhes on the floor uncontrollably devastated by the images that he is being forced to consider and the notions that he is contending with with. When he delivers another of the play's famous lines, arise, Black Vengeance, he finds this real resonance in his voice that invokes the sense of rolling thunder and a great storm approaching. All of this alongside Toby Jones, very unique take on Iago. One who is this sort of very common Everyman who doesn't declare himself the villain in the same way that we have seen previous Iago's do. It is not a typical portrayal of this character. And in many ways, I think some of the choices made here are to his detriment, because both sort of to the audience and to each character that he is in conversation with, there's a sense of an Iago who is a very convincing actor, one who is trying to stay down to earth and reasonable. There's this quality of decency and honor as he seems reluctant to make any kind of a real accusation, as he implores Othello, even as he deliberately plants the seed of doubt in his mind not to punish Cassio and not to think ill of his wife. And he is stammering all the while when he is in conversation with Rodrigo, one of his accomplices, when he is lying to Cassio, when he is lying to his wife, or of course, to Othello himself. And there's only really a couple of moments where we get to glimpse the sort of Machiavellian qualities that we usually associate with en Iago. We get to see it in an exchange with his wife after she retrieves Desdemona's accidentally discarded handkerchief, one which her husband has for some time been asking her to try and steal for him. We as the audience know that this is going to be part of some malevolent scheme, though she does not. And as he grows quickly violent with her, one of the few characters on stage who to his mind, sort of ranks beneath him and to whom he can show his truer colors, then we get a glimpse of it with him ripping the handkerchief out of her hands. And there are moments as the whole thing unfolds that we get to see that quality as well. But I just don't know that he is necessarily insidious. And it's not that I want him to come across as a pantomime villain or a Bond villain or something that obvious, but there is something about his Iaga that perhaps lacks a certain amount of theatricality and doesn't really pair well with the Othello that David has crafted. There is this. There is something to this trio of performers and the fact that they're all performing in different versions of Othello, which I feel is a little detrimental. And it means that the scenes between them don't flow in the way that they ought to. We don't get this sense of subtly and gradually shifting power between Iago and Othello during this extended scene in the first act, when he is revealing to him the suspicions that he has about Desdemona and Cassio, but trying to feign reluctance. The scene doesn't grow, the temperature doesn't shift in the way that it ought to. And it could also just be that this sort of common, resentful Iago earnestly delivering the line about jealousy, the green eyed monster, seems scarcely capable of engineering such a complex scheme of duplicity and vengeance. Then we arrive at Caitlin Fitzgerald as Desdemona, who I am 99% certain was portraying the character with an American accent, one which I assume is her own native accent. There was indecision about this even around me at the theatre as I overheard people speculating about whether or not it was sort of Irish. I think it's just that little bit anglicised. But it was something of an oddity in a production that otherwise had some sense of consistency in terms of the accents being used. Interestingly, and I don't know that there necessarily ought to be any kind of a right answer as to the ages of these characters. I would say that the whole trio sort of of skewed older than you would perceive in many other productions. You often see very young Desdemona's. Because inherently, the principal quality of this character is naivety for one reason or another. And even in those productions that make the choice to infuse her with more agency and with more confidence and more worldliness. And it isn't naivety due to youth and her finding herself immersed in a world that she's never really understood before. She is still, for one reason or another, characteristically naive because she spends so much of the play pleading with her husband to mend his relationship with Cassio, blissfully unaware of the fact that he thinks the two of them are having an affair. And this is making it look even worse. She is, figuratively speaking, digging her own grave at this point. And this Desdemona, because she doesn't feel like she was a child five minutes ago, because she feels. Feels like a woman with her own opinions, unafraid to stand up to her husband and make requests of him, feels like she has a naivety that stems more from privilege than anything else because there's still a slightly disconnected quality. She smiles for most of the play until she's getting slapped in the face, at which point there is a line about how she is crying even though she is not. She eventually does, but there's something about our emotional connection to her as a character that isn't really working from the beginning because there's just this slight quality. It isn't smugness, but there's something sort of pseudo condescending about the way that she navigates some of these earlier scenes. It's the angle at which she holds her chin. It's her demeanor alongside some of the other characters. And I think with Othello, who is slightly older, with Niaga, who is slightly older, it invites an interesting question of the kind of a Desdemona that would work in this production. I don't know that this is really the answer. She also, on a couple of occasions, and it's a pseudo contemporary aesthetic throughout the production, but has a distinctly modern sensibility. The way that she delivers the line what in if it were? And a sort of a shrug that she offers to her husband towards the beginning, after their marriage is eventually accepted by society, fly in the face of the country of tone that everyone else is trying to curate. Vanette Robinson, meanwhile, I thought was really terrific as Amelia. And it's a great role. You have to wait almost the entire play to get to the real meat of her material. But in looking back retrospectively to those earlier moments, it offers a lot to the actor in terms of how they begin to characterize this woman and the very meaningful glances that she offers to Desdemona after pocketing the handkerchief and after witnessing her distress at having lost it, and the issue that this causes between her and her husband, the sort of instant guilt that you can see on Amelia's expression when regarding Desdemona, and then seconds later, the suspicion that she has when looking at her husband, though not enough to raise alarm bells at this stage. Amelia's final moments, to use my most articulate description I wrote down in my little book here, were effing fire. And Vinette does a remarkable job of really becoming ablaze with emotion and indignation and injustice in these final few scenes, and her Amelia eventually becomes a highlight of the production that she scarcely appears in Luke Treadway Also worth mentioning as Michael Cassio, a role that I don't tend to think offers all that much, but brilliant in his passion, suitably earnest and undone by the way that he has acted and the situation that he has has brought upon himself, that he, like just about everybody else in the play, has been slightly deceived into by the villainous Iago and in company with a handful of other supporting roles, Some real moments to take notice of from Jude Owusu finally, then let me finish walking you through this production by talking in more detail about some of its creative choices.

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Micky Jo (28:11)

Now let's start with the design here. Now this is by Ty Green and to begin with, it not only looks very stylish on stage and works very functionally, but it also pairs very nicely with the very regal gold interior of the Theatre Royal Haymarket Auditorium, which is just stunning. The theater zone mouldings and proscenium are sort of echoed in the gold outlines of the structures seen on stage. And what is otherwise a particularly dark set. So much so that they actually use one of the boxes to represent the home of Brabantio. When Rodrigo is calling out to him to aware of his daughter having just gone off and married Othello, which is a nice enough directing choice, I wish. It spoke to an urgency of a production which felt like it was exploding out of the stage into the auditorium at every turn. But outside of those moments where they literally were walking around us, it wasn't really. And all they ultimately would do is occasionally run on from one side to make us jump. When we were first going to war, that doesn't really amount to much or ring a bell while they were circling behind. But something interesting does happen with, with this set design because when we do go off to war, then the whole thing lifts up and there's a moment where it's sort of hanging and dangling and blowing in the breeze as we are experiencing a great storm and denoting a little bit of chaos. Subsequently it lifts out entirely and we are left with something a little more stark, a little more bleak. I do enjoy the wall of chain curtain at the back which can be projected onto some great projection design credited here to Nina Dunn. Some lovely visuals there. We get a nice moonlight moment, we get a sort of a more reddened sky, we get the outlines of some trees, we get a kind of bedroom window for Othello and Desdemona. Towards the end of the thing, we also occasionally get footage of the actors own faces in an attempt perhaps to remind us of their humanity and the deed that has been done by the end of the thing. It feels like clutching at emotional straws, to be completely honest. And it does. Doesn't really work. If by that point we didn't really care about watching a woman get strangled to death by her own husband. Seeing a close up of her face in black and white artistically across a piece of set is probably not going to make a difference. Worth saying as well. I don't think these scenic elements really helped with the whole thing. Having this very symmetrically Staged static quality, costume wise. I have an awful lot to say about this because it was pseudo contemporary dress, but perhaps trying to evoke a little bit of a more classical style. The military uniforms were more modern. I enjoyed the difference, like I mentioned before, between Othello's and Iago's. Early on, Iago wore this red beret in the first act, which to my mind perhaps spoke to the villainous thoughts happening in his head. When he wasn't wearing it, it was rolled up and stuffed into a little epaulette on his shoulder, which sort of felt like the devil on a his shoulder. Not equated to an angel on the other side because he's only, you know, getting bad ideas. And it's not the only striking use of red we saw throughout the show because the Venetian characters who entreat Othello to go and wage a war on their behalf towards the beginning arrive in these very ostentatious red capes, which was somewhere between the movie Conclave and a choir that you might see standing behind Lady Gaga. Not for nothing, they also had land. A few scenes later, I literally wrote down who's the chef in a Halloween costume? Not just a party shop Halloween costume, which, and this is my biggest grievance, looked far too clean the first time we saw it. But also a literal comedy beard with a piece of elastic around the back. Well, this is the ingenious disguise worn by Rodrigo, who has followed them as we have transitioned to a different location. In league with Iago, though we don't see him for an awful long time. In all order to continue to pursue Desdemona because he can neither get a convincing disguise nor a hint. And this wasn't the only strange outfit that we would see during the course of the play. Like I said, some good choices being made. Othello's very buttoned up, professional looking uniform gets literally unbuttoned as he begins to figuratively and mentally unravel Heading into the second act, he gets more visibly disheveled. He got sort of of gets stripped of the honor of his uniform when he isn't wearing the jacket by the end of the thing. Desdemona, meanwhile, is increasingly and for no obvious reason, wearing what looks like maternity wear. There's this inexplicable kind of a muumu that she has on during the second act, but even before then, a sort of a halter top jumpsuit, satin nightwear kind of a vibe. She wears some extra inexplicable outfits in this show, but is rivaled by the brief Cameo from Bianca, who walks on in the second act looking like a 1970s zebra. As my fiance Erin James put it, I was waiting for her to dance the rich man's frug. Which I dare say would actually have been more entertaining. I want to talk a little bit about some of the soundscapes now. There is music composed for this production by PJ Harvey with John Nichols, who is also responsible for the sound design. And I found a lot of the musical moments to be a little bit too abrupt and also not there when we needed them. Because some of those laugh moments when Toby Jones says something as Iago or someone says something about him and it gets a laugh. I don't think they would happen if we had a better sense of the tone in that moment via a little bit of just sort of trembling underscore. It almost always happened punctuated by silence. And that wasn't helpful when the underscore did arrive. It was almost always with these introductory chords that felt a little bit too declarative. Like it was almost an arrival of explicit its song. Rather than the sort of creeping quality that you want to gradually fade in during a play. This isn't a musical, though. That doesn't mean that nobody sings. There is a moment when Desdemona sang towards the end of the second act, the direction of which, and I'm sorry to use this adjective but was abominable because she has asked Amelia to leave. And then Amelia keeps going to leave and Desdemona keeps then bursting once more in into song. And it started to feel like a farce. It started to remind me of a scene from a Joshua Harmon play. Bad Jews, I'd seen at the same theater more than a decade ago, when someone is singing laughably bad and everyone else is pretending not to think it's funny. Finally, we absolutely have to talk about Richard Howell's lighting design. And this is what I was missing. This, that I have recreated in my room here, this sense of red. We never saw a lighting state like that. Even when once it was mostly sort of this slight, glowing golden quality. There wasn't a great variety in the sense of color that we were using in the lighting, which wasn't the biggest problem. The really egregious thing was, as we arrived in this final scene, in those that had been leading up to it, the scenic elements had been moving out. The bed comes forwards and we are readying ourselves for the conclusion that we all know is coming. At this point, you know, the majority of an audience, particularly depressed night performance, has a very clear sense of what is going to happen here. We know what the roles are in a production of Othello, there's no sense of surprise. And we had these lighting rigs coming into the space, lowering down from above, coming clearly into view. If the production wasn't already pseudo contemporary, then it would feel anachronistic. And I assumed that this was because we were eventually going to arrive at some sort of very forensic moment when all of these lights simultaneously focused on the bed, were going to illuminate in very harsh reality the act of aggression being displayed here. But they never really shone that brightly on it. Instead, we get to this final scene. Othello walks on holding a candle. He talks about turning out the light. He uses that as a metaphor for killing his wife. And then the few lights that are focused on the them come from off stage, leaving me baffled as to why we bothered to bring that many different lamps. There's like 40 different lamps rigged up across six or seven different pieces of apparatus that are brought into the playing space to just sort of be ineffectually dim. A legitimately inexplicable choice, but admittedly not the biggest problem faced by this production of Othello. So, as you can tell, I had many reservations about the effectiveness of this production. As always, that was just my opinion and I welcome you sharing yours in the comment section down below, particularly if you wildly disagree with me. If you loved this production, if you thought it was captivating, if you were emotionally engaged, you thought it was compelling, let us know why, let us know whose performance was your favourite. And for what it's worth, like I said before, if you have no familiarity with Othello, but perhaps were interested by the casting, or you just have time this month and would like to go and check this production out for yourself, I encourage you to do so because I actually think that this is a pretty decent first Othello for people who have no prior experience with the play. And what is theatre if we aren't all going and making up our own opinions in the meantime, thank you so much for listening to mine and listening to this full review. If you enjoyed, make sure to subscribe to my theatre themed YouTube channel. There is a button that looks like a bell somewhere below my face. If you click that, YouTube will let you know. Every time I share a new video, whether it's a news update, a review or a theatre going vlog, you can also find me on all good podcast platforms as well as your favorite social media apps. I will see you there. And as always, I hope that everyone is staying safe and that you have a stagey day. For 10 more seconds, I'm Micky Jo Theatre. Oh my God. Hey, thanks for watching. Have a stagey day. Subscribe.

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