Othello – review (original) (raw)

It's been billed in advance as a classic encounter between two stars of The Wire, Clarke Peters and Dominic West. But what first impresses about this much-touted event is the direction by Daniel Evans.

He has come up with one of those increasingly rare Shakespeare productions: one that, without embracing any outrageous concept, suffuses the text with a wealth of psychological detail.

The long-range planning is evident from the start when Brabantio spurns his daughter Desdemona, by hurling her to the ground in a manner that Othello will later echo.

The play's central problem, which is not making Othello himself look a credulous ass in believing in his wife's infidelity, is also partially solved by turning Cassio into a bit of a rake: one who warmly hugs Desdemona when he greets her in Cyprus and who later smothers Iago's wife in lascivious kisses. Even the long, lingering look that Desdemona gives the disgraced Cassio is enough to arouse any husband's suspicions. In short, Iago in this production has plenty to work on.

But it is the stars people have come to see and Dominic West's fine Iago benefits greatly from the production's scrupulous attention to detail. West gives us a plain, blunt Yorkshire-accented ensign who says of Othello right from the start, "in followin' 'im, I follow but myself." There is also a revealing touch when West publicly taunts Emilia, his wife, with failing to produce an heir: a gesture that leads her to bury her head in shame and that says a lot about his own misogyny and a decaying marriage.

West is not, like some Iagos, a surrogate artist or a matador playing with a bull-like Othello. What he offers us, with driving energy, is a bluff, dirty-minded NCO who is filled with a rancourous, destructive negativity that leads him to detest Othello for his "free and open nature" and to loathe Cassio for the simple reason "he hath a daily beauty in his life that makes me ugly." I've seen more visibly malignant Iagos; but what is excellent about West is that he has a surface honesty that makes him grammatically plausible and that yields a lot of laughs.

In contrast, Clarke Peters's Othello is wildly erratic. He makes a good impression at the beginning: dignified, noble, heroic in his appearance before the Venetian senate and even sounding the right Shakespearian music in a line like "she gave me for my pains a world of sighs." But, as the evening progresses the performance loses focus and, in the terrifying scene of Othello's epileptic fit, textual accuracy. Peters's flaw is he tends to act the emotion rather than allow it to emerge through the language and, although he recovers his poise, I felt of this Othello "I understand the fury of your words but not the words."

For a prize piece of Shakespearean acting you have only to look to Alexandra Gilbreath's Emilia. She offers us a complete character: a professional soldier's raunchy, sex-starved wife with an eye for a young lieutenant but also a deep attachment to Desdemona. You see the growing guilt on Gilbreath's face when she realises that, through the stolen handkerchief, she has hardened Othello's suspicions about his wife and it seems fitting at the end that the dead Emilia should take her place on the bed alongside Lily James's spirited Desdemona.

But that is typical of the care of Evans's production. It looks good with an octagonal platform set against a back wall that evokes both the watery corrosion of Venice and the sun-bleached world of Cyprus. And, although there is an imbalance in the central partnership, you get all the intensity of Shakespeare's most domestic and time-bound tragedy. Sheffield is lucky to have a production of this calibre.