Cues and balls in Othello
Frantic Assembly’s placing of Shakespeare’s Othello on and around a pool table in a West Yorkshire pub certainly takes some beating for daring and originality, if not commonsense.
It’s interesting how the race issue energises interpretations of this play. One of the silliest was a Washington DC production by Jude Kelly in which Patrick Stewart played a white Othello to a black Iago.
And a German production by Peter Zadek had a “blacked-up” Othello whose body paint came off all over Desdemona and her white night gown as he killed her on the marriage bed, but not before he’d raped her ferociously all over the stage and indeed on top of one of the wardrobes.
Scandalous legend has it that Laurence Olivier, who covered himself from head to toe in three layers of black and blue Nubian slave make-up and buffed himself with a piece of chiffon till he gleamed, would stand naked in front of the mirror and declare, “How sad indeed that such a very great actor should have such a very small cock.”
Olivier was a very quick actor, but not as quick as Maggie Smith, who was his Desdemona, and this annoyed him. He made the big error of chiding her for what he wrongly supposed was her sloppy articulation. He advocated much rounder vowel sounds.
Maggie took the point coldly and waited for the next performance. On the half, she poked her head round the door of Olivier’s dressing room, where he sat in his full and naked glory. “How Now, Brown Cow?” she mockingly intoned. “That’s much better, Maggie, darling,” he replied without suggesting he’d even got the joke.
Othello has to be played by a black actor these days, but we simply don’t have a black Olivier, who was monumentally magnificent in the role, despite some critical jeering about his rolling eyes and pantherine gait.
The director Franco Zeffirelli went to see him expecting the last flourish of the romantic tradition of acting.”It’s nothing of the sort,” he said. “It’s an anthology of everything that has been discovered about acting in the last three centuries. It’s grand and majestic, but it’s also modern and realistic.”
Jimmy Akingbola in the Frantic Assembly version is certainly modern and realistic. He passes on the rest, alas. It will be interesting to see how the imposingly handsome Patrice Naiambana shapes up for the RSC next year.
But it’s a sign of the times that the director Kathryn Hunter receives top billing on the press release and says she intends to re-examine the heart of the tragedy “with a superlative ensemble of actors.” The age of tragic individual heroism is dead.