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Birthday Bard: Will and a way to successfully portray Othello
IF ever there was a Shakespeare play which needed celebrities to attract a large audience, it is Othello.
It is arguably even more tragic than King Lear.
Laurence Olivier played the same trick over 50 years ago with his hideous Gogul-like nose and lashings of dark yellow make-up, playing the Moor opposite Maggie Smith as his wife, Desdemona.
In Michael Grandage’s 2007 prize-winning Donmar/ Wyndhams production of Othello, he got rid of all such surface trickery. Chiwetel Ejiofor, the black actor, played the role, and Ewan McGregor the relentless villain, Iago. Tom Hiddleston amazed himself as is his wont by acting brilliantly as Cassio.
Now, two years later, in time for Shakespeare’s birthday today (April 23), the ever-enterprising Naxos Audiobooks have brought out this thrilling Othello (£13.99) at the same time as From Shakespeare – With Love (£8.99), with the likes of Juliet Stevenson and David Tennant as the icing on the cake.
After listening to this abridged Othello with all the concentration I could muster – it demands nothing less – only Jonathan Keeble performing the magnificent sonnet, “The expense of spirit in a waste of shame”, made any sense to me.
As with Hamlet and King Lear, there are too many dead bodies by the end of Othello, with not a shred of explanation as to why he was so insane as to strangle the wife he loved so much apart from his blinding innocence driving him mad.
Dominic Dromgoole comes nearest to a plausible explanation in Will and Me – How Shakespeare Took Over My Life (Penguin £8.99), the most gutsy and life-affirming introduction to Shakespeare I have ever come across in my life: “His [Othello’s] verse is an echo of every nervous outsider trying to prove himself better than every smug insider. Or any pompous ass, like myself, straining with the self-consciousness of youth.”
The next play by Shakespeare in the Donmar Warehouse season was Twelfth Night, with Derek Jacobi surpassing himself as Malvolio. Dominic’s description of Malvolio as “the man more in need of a blow job than any character in literature”, will linger long in my memory.
Dominic, the artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe on the South Bank, is to the Bard what Nick Hornby is to football.
JOHN HORDER |
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