The Ottawa Citizen, June 07, 2007
Stratford's Othello is white-hot production
By: Jamie Portman
The Stratford Festival has unveiled an Othello for the decades.
In fact, in the festival's 54-year-history, this may well be the best treatment of Shakespeare's dark and violent tragedy of sexual jealousy. Certainly, there has been nothing to match it in the past three decades.
David Latham's production, performed on the virtually unadorned thrust stage of the Tom Patterson theatre, has excitement and atmosphere -- and also a dreadful inevitability -- as the scheming ensign Iago proceeds to destroy the noble black general, Othello, a man he hates with a vicious, ruthless intensity.
Iago is one of the great villains of dramatic literature, such a formidable presence on stage that he often upsets the dramatic balance. The production, which opened at Stratford on the weekend, has an absolutely superb Iago in the person of Jonathan Goad, who delivers a riveting study in evil. But it also has a powerful Othello in Philip Akin, an actor who can hold the stage with authority and communicate the emotional inferno that consumes his character.
It is a story that mainly unfolds in darkness, and this production benefits visually from a compelling lighting design by Michael J. Whitfield. As for the rich blacks, reds and golds of Carolyn M. Smith's costumes, they provide a dramatic counterpoint to the lurking shadows that define this as perhaps the most emotionally claustrophobic of Shakespeare's plays.
This is also by far the best-spoken Shakespeare so far in the current Stratford season, and the benchmark is set early by Goad, whose handling of the verse is strikingly naturalistic and whose instinct for orchestrating a big scene is unfailing.
The issue of Iago's true motivations has long been a consuming topic of controversy among scholars: Can we really believe that he acts as he does simply because he's enraged at being passed over for a promotion?
However, Goad's performance makes this a non-issue. As Iago launches his cunning campaign of lying, scheming and innuendo in order to persuade Othello that his wife, Desdemona, has been unfaithful, you're always conscious of the sheer pleasure he derives from his actions. There's no mistaking the cankered joy with which this Iago casually betrays friendships, dupes those who trust him, and cruelly manipulates those who love him. He is facile of tongue, confident of his charm and impudent in his sexuality.
This is a Iago who ultimately commits evil for evil's sake -- who personifies the motiveless malignity theories of critics such as A.C. Bradley.
But what's especially remarkable about Goad's performance is it takes Iago and the play into even more unsettling territory when, in an angry confrontation with his adoring wife, Emilia, beautifully played by Lucy Peacock, he virtually commits an act of sexual assault against her.
At this point, the careful facade is shattered and we are face to face with a sociopath.
The evening is full of such unexpected jolts, but they are never gratuitous. There's an astonishing moment when Othello, driven by jealousy into madness and murder, begins to strangle Desdemona in her bed and she fights back desperately. Hers is a messy death, far messier than we normally see in a presentation of this play, but it carries the uncomfortable ring of truth.
In Philip Akin's portrayal, there is never any doubt of Othello's nobility, even at its most ravaged. Neither is there any doubt of the grief he feels over the evidence of Desdemona's betrayal, so carefully manufactured by Iago.
And certainly the jealousy is there in all its corrosive, destructive power.
But he goes beyond a depiction of a mind slowly unravelling to offer us a man who is torn between two cultures -- the culture of western mankind, with its trust in reason, and a more primal culture in which an intense, uncurbed emotion can wreak havoc.
Akin's Othello is an explosion waiting to happen. And he takes Shakespeare and the play into a startling new dimension when Othello's speeches become a torrent of meaningless abstract images -- "word music" is how George Bernard Shaw described them -- unique within the Shakespearean canon. Tumbling out from Akin like white-hot lava, they are a release into another demon-ridden world.
The other performances are excellent, beginning with Claire Jullien's courageous, but tragically uncomprehending, Desdemona, and continuing with Peacock's wonderful Emilia, Jeffrey Wetsch's nuanced work as the ill-used Cassio and John Koensgen's observant characterization of that tragic ninny, Rodrigo. This is a Shakespeare that does Stratford and its traditions proud.