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- [00:00]
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- [00:57]
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- [01:59]
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- [02:23]
Micky Jo
So this production, it has been reported, is the first in a planned series of contemporary Shakespearean productions to be staged by director Tom Morris for Chris Harper Productions, which, having attended the show's opening night performance this evening, I am currently working very hard not to interpret as some kind of a threat. Othello. My God. Hey. Welcome back to my theatre themed YouTube channel or hello to those of you listening to this review on podcast platforms. My name is Mickey Jo and I'm obsessed with all things theatre theatre. I am a professional theatre critic and a content creator here on social media and this evening in my capacity as a critic, I attended the opening night performance of Othello at Theatre Royal Haymarket, the West End return of one of Shakespeare's most celebrated and most produced tragedies. Being based in the uk, we get a fairly heavy circulation of the more prolific Shakespearean titles. We get a lot of Hamlets, we get a lot of Macbeth's, we get a lot of Othellos. Don't even talk to me about the Midsummer Night's Dreams. The they're everywhere. And given that it doesn't feel like that long since Othello last received a major London production. I have seen at least three prior different productions of Othello in my theatre going lifetime. I was deeply curious about the impetus for this production beyond some exciting casting with David Harewood reprising his performance as Othello and Toby Jones playing the villainous Iago alongside him. Now in this full review we will be talking about both of their performances as well as the supporting cast and of course the overall production, the design, the direction, as well as the slightly peculiar in which it was received by tonight's audience. Which brings me to, as always, my next request. If you have been in the audience for this particular production of Othello already, or if you would like to share your thoughts on a production of Othello that you have seen previously as a theatregoer, let me and everyone else know in the comments section down below while you're listening to my thoughts and if you enjoy, make sure to subscribe to my theatre themed YouTube channel or follow me on podcast platforms for the next review, inevitably coming very soon. In the meantime, we are about to get Shakespearean up in here. Let me tell you what I thought of Othello. So like I said, this is a play that I have seen on a handful of occasions, some very different perspectives on it and at this point what I particularly yearn for from any production of Othello is a real perspective, some kind of a statement on the final act of the play that we are building towards here. This is going to be a spoiler alert for an incredibly old piece of drama which is this devastating and horrifying violent injustice committed against women in the current social and cultural landscape. I Think it's really important that any production of Othello be armed with something to say about this. And before we arrive at my thoughts on whether or not this production did, let's talk a little bit about the place so that we are all on the same page with what we're talking about here. Othello is a Shakespearean tragedy named for its title character, who is a military general who has recently eloped with the daughter of a Venetian nobleman. He is Brabantio, but after a little introductory racism, he scarcely matters. His daughter is Desmond Demona. She matters a hell of a lot. I say early racism because Othello is a Moor, which was a term used at the time to describe an individual with darker skin. He is understood to be a canonically black character, and for the last few decades, we in the theater industry have managed to successfully cast him with black actors. I know points to us. Everybody pat yourselves on the back. I say we. I was born in 1995, and I. I don't want anything to do with the Othellos that came before then. In fact, one of the more interesting details of this production is David Harewood was first black actor to play the role of Othello at the rsc. A statistic and a little piece of historical trivia that we probably don't want to dig too much into, but I shall carry on. We learn about all of this through the frustrations of a man named Rodrigo, who had hoped to court Desdemona for himself, in spite of the fact that her father wasn't particularly keen on him either. Though admittedly, when it comes to it, he admits he would rather she had married Rodrigo than a black guy. Listen, they were different times. All of this stirred into something of an emotional frenzy by Iago. Now Iago is sort of of the main narrating character presence of the play. We become better acquainted with the inner machinations of his sort of malicious, nefarious mind than we do with Othello himself. Othello is the object of his scheming and his undermining because, as Iago tells us fairly early on, he hates him. Ironically, with the irony to come, this is, and you can choose your own interpretation here a little bit, perhaps due to some level of racism or professional jealousy. Certainly he is resentful of the appointment of Michael Cassio to a senior military role under Othello, which was not bestowed unto him. But explicitly, we are told that Iago believes rumors that Othello, that Othello may have had an affair with his wife Emilia. Now the irony comes into play because that sort of informs the scheme that Iago sets about preparing, because he then plans to create uncertainty in Othello's mind about the possibility of his new wife, Desdemona, having had an affair with his closest friend Cassio, the same man who helped him court and woo Desdemona in the first place. And so, carefully, brilliantly and wickedly, Iago creates in the mind of Othello, as he calls it, the green eyed monster of jealousy, a term coined in this play, as is the equally colorful the Beast with Two Backs. But try as I might, I cannot work that one organically into my description of the plot. I'm only human anyway. Iago steadily creates more and more layers of deceit and confusion in order to propel Othello towards this inevitable, tragic, violent outcome in which he murders Desdemona in their bed. Hers being not the only bloodshed in the final few scenes of the play. And along the way, there is an awful lot, especially as a contemporary director, that you could extract from it, about the role of women and the comparative power of women. And there's a lot that you could say about abuse in relationships through not only Desdemona's character, but also the frustrations articulated by her confidant Emilia, who happens also to be the wife of Iago. And generally speaking, if you're bringing a new production of Othello to the stage, it's sort of anticipated that you're either going to talk about that side of things or you're going to talk about the racism of it all, or, you know, both. They aren't mutually exclusive. It's a little surprising then, to arrive upon an Othello that seems inspired to address neither, at least not in any kind of meaningful or particularly effective way. And it's not just because I didn't feel like it had enough to say. It's also because I don't know if it even lived up to its own marketing. Not only do we never get a lighting state that's nearly as thrilling as the one depicted on the poster with all of this red and intensity, but I assumed that that was going to speak to the vibe of the production itself and that it was going to be a truly balanced trio between Iago, Othello and Desdemona, which it wasn't really, once again, and I know the limitations of the script are what they are, but the was still in every sense relegated to the side of the plot. I had been hoping for some kind of intense exchange of power and this really tight, focused acting between Toby Jones and David Harewood. I don't know that that really manifested in this production either. The characterizations that they arrived at were not nearly in sync with each other in a production I sort of found to be tonally all over the place. One which lacked a sense of that intensity I was looking for, but also drive and pace and darkness even. There were so many moments where the audience were unfortunately erupting in laughter, generally because of lines delivered by or about Iago that referenced him being such an honest and honorable man. This after we had already witnessed a certain amount of his scheming and backstabbing and malice. And so people were laughing at how comical it was. But this is not something I have ever really witnessed in a previous production of Othello. There's little details in the creative approach that I think could have circumvented this. But generally it did seem as though we were sort of leaning into that slightly comic idea within the direction, within the delivery of some of those more audacious lines of dialogue and almost courting a certain amount of laughter, which became particularly egregious, I thought, as we began to accelerate towards this very visible, inevitable ending. I actually wrote down here. I'd like to read this out to you, too. Little reminder that we are accelerating towards a devastating, violent injustice against women. And moments after I wrote that line down, the delivery of the line, strangle her in her bed as an instruction from Iago to Othello got a huge laugh, which I just about lost my mind at a few scenes previous to this where Othello is lingering in a doorway and overhearing a conversation between Iago and the unknowing Cassio, which Iago has engineered to sound suspicious, even though they are talking about a different woman entirely. A woman with whom he has been having an affair. Athela. Here's a line about a handkerchief that he had bestowed to Desdemona. And then he exclaims something in response to this. This gets a big laugh as well, which, given the circumstances, it really ought not to because of the fate that it implies. Then for Desdemona do we care to so little for the death of this innocent woman that we are in stitches about the whole situation? That is not what this play is meant to be. It's not a comedy. And if it were being staged at the Globe, where everything is played a little more broadly and where they can find these sort of little inlets of comedy and levity in the. Even the darker pieces, I would get it. But that's not what this production is purporting to be. And it's with no kind of success that it's heading in that direction, because it's not. Alongside moments of real dark darkness, there is a big old gasp coming a few scenes later when Othello strikes Desdemona on the face in front of a crowd of newly arrived Venetian officials. This is. He is becoming more and more overt with his disdain towards her. One which she finds understandably, completely baffling. Once more, we are living in a play whose plot could be very easily diverted in a different direction if everyone were to sit down and have an emotionally intelligent conversation. But they're not gonna do that. And I needn't offer you another spoiler warning because we've talked about the ending of this plot already. But even as Desdemon Mona is being strangled by her husband in their marital bed and she is pleading with him, let me live tonight, murder me tomorrow. Even that is getting a little bit of a laugh from the audience, which I find to be a huge, major shortcoming of this production. By that point, our collective hearts should be in our throats. We shouldn't be chuckling about it. Now, I've identified a handful of the production's problems. I don't know that I've necessarily all the way analyzed them for you yet. And one of the bigger things I think is just a disappointing direction from Tom Morris, which to me felt inconsistent because I really enjoyed the beginning. These opening moments with Iago and Rodrigo to one side, discussing their disappointments with recent events and are seeing those events depicted in Silent Tableau. Upstage, we see a wedding ceremony between Othello and Desdemona. We see him greeting Cassio as his recent military appointment is discussed. And I love all of this, not only because it's a nice sort of visual introduction to the storytelling, but also because it makes the Shakespeare of it all more accessible to first time audiences. Everything I'm going to say about this production notwithstanding, I do think that it's a particularly accessible first time Othello for anyone who is not previously particularly au fait with the play, or necessarily with Shakespeare even, I think this one is quite easy to grasp. The unfortunate thing is that after we get out of that initial scene and before we arrive at a couple of moments of violent altercation towards the end of the play, the majority of the thing is sort of fatally static, structured only around the arrivals of different characters into a sort of a formation. The whole thing is very symmetrically directed across the stage, as though we arrive have a conversation with a minimal shift in the power dynamic and not nearly enough emotional conference between these characters, all of which makes the dialogue in these long scenes start to feel particularly tedious. At which point, ahead of talking about the rest of the production's creative decisions, I think it would be pertinent to discuss the.
- [15:06]
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- [16:05]
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- [16:28]
Micky Jo
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.
- [26:37]
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- [27:34]
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- [28:12]
Micky Jo
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.
- [37:52]
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