Run, Desdemona, Run
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
Can Americans play Shakespeare? It is an old question, and an irritating one. The Yanks (our detractors say) have little felicity with speaking Shakespeare. Lacking a rich tradition of verse theater, we lean on the physical side of his plays, over-emoting at the expense of the poetry. You lack the skills to make him sing (our detractors say): Why not stick to those funny musicals you’re always writing?
Lately the Brooklyn Academy of Music has been piling up the evidence for this line of attack. That its administrators are patriots, I have no doubt. But the imports that have flowed into Brooklyn from England of late have tended to leave even the most jingoistic observer, if he’s honest, with the sneaking fear that our detractors may be onto something. To see Mark Rylance’s dazzling, three-character turn in “Cymbeline,” or Edward Hall’s hilarious, moving “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” is to be reminded of how high the bar can be.
BAM’s new “Othello” will give the anglophiles pause. Cheek by Jowl, founded more than two decades ago by director Declan Donnellan and designer Nick Ormerod, is known for its bold treatment of the classics. On this, its third visit to Brooklyn, the British company sometimes achieves a wrenching power. Mostly the production fails to engage, in the stereotype (the false stereotype, I need hardly add) of the American fashion.
The show runs this week at the BAM Harvey, and, like many designers before him, Mr. Ormerod realizes his ideal scenery is the BAM Harvey. The production uses the full depth of the ancient theater, all the way back to the crude beauty of the rear wall. The reddish tones of the old paint complement this play about deadly Mediterranean passions.
Five coffin-shaped crates are situated here and there, leaving vast expanses of empty stage. The cast seems overwhelmed by all that space. They’re forever darting thither and yon for no discernible reason, forcing Shakespeare’s word-music to compete with a dozen actors’ foot music. It can be like watching a track meet in blank verse.
Nobody gets a better workout than Othello. At 6 feet 6 inches, Nonso Anozie towers over Iago, and the rest of the cast. But he’s seems to be an essentially gentle giant. He doesn’t carry himself like a soldier, let alone a famous general. When Iago finally succeeds in driving Othello mad, it’s surprisingly easy for Mr. Anozie to revert to a kind of childlike innocence.
Maybe Mr. Anozie does it as some at tempt at compensation, but I can’t recall an Othello who spends more of the show knocking people around. Much of the time, the physical violence drowns out the lyrical violence. It’s too bad, because Mr. Anozie has a remarkably lovely, flexible voice. By the time Othello gets around to strangling his wife (squeezing her by the throat, with both hands, dangling her several feet off the floor), his fury has lost the power to shock.
Mr. Donnellan’s best scene uses violence sparingly, to highlight without distracting. In claiming that he doesn’t want to arouse Othello’s suspicions, Iago makes him doubly, triply suspicious. The scene culminates when, after failing to make Iago disclose what he knows or suspects about Desdemona, Othello shoves him against the proscenium arch. Mr. Anozie wraps his massive fist around his neck, putting all the focus on Iago’s famous line, “O, beware, my lord, of jealousy; / It is the green-eyed monster which doth mock / The meat it feeds on.”
Slim, with a crew cut and scruffy beard, Jonny Phillips’s Iago brings to mind the sort of villain Tim Roth always plays. The physical disparity between the two men makes them seem like Shakespeare by way of “National Geographic”: Iago’s destruction of Othello is like a jackal bringing down some gentle, lumbering creature in the wild.
Mr. Phillips, like Mr. Anozie, relies too much on animal force to act the part. Simon Russell Beale had his detractors when he played a dry, finicky Iago at BAM a few years ago, but at least you could hear the verse. (I am told Mr. Phillips has been ill, which would explain some of the trouble.) His best moment, in fact, is wordless. The foolish Cassio (Ryan Kiggell) thanks “honest Iago” and embraces him. As Iago draws back, Mr. Kiggell freezes; Mr. Phillips looks from him to the audience, with a perfectly deranged smile. “And what’s he then that says I play the villain?” he asks us.
Mr. Donnellan’s innovations tend to go awry. When Iago invents a story about the sleeping Cassio mounting him one night (thinking him Desdemona), Othello watches, in horror, as Cassio re-enacts the action nearby. It’s original, though probably unwise: What Othello imagines could be a hundred times more vile than anything we can depict onstage. More crucially, these visions shift our focus; we watch Cassio instead of watching Othello.
Later, Cassio has a surreal encounter with Bianca, his lover. Dressed in black leather, she spanks him with Desdemona’s fatal handkerchief. It’s not in the text, the traditionalist tuts. It’s not not in the text, the innovator responds. It’s silly and in bad taste, the critic concludes, silencing all.
By the time the death scene rolls around, the production grows somewhat cacophonous. For all his power and grace, Mr. Anozie can’t come up with Othello’s madness. Caroline Martin’s doomed Desdemona is affecting, but Jaye Griffiths’s Emilia keeps pivoting between mannered under acting and wild overacting. Then comes Mr. Donnellan’s final innovation.
Shakespeare scholars have puzzled for centuries over Iago’s last line, “Demand me nothing: what you know, you know: / From this time forth I never will speak word.” A master of vile words, falling silent at his moment of seeming triumph? This production unravels the textual mystery by changing the text. A few moments later, when Othello stabs himself, Iago howls, “No!” It can’t be a good sign that the most emphatic line in this “Othello” is one that Shakespeare didn’t write.