Authors: William Shakespeare
Stephen Brimson Lewis’ set in 2004 intensified the sense of claustrophobia in the play by having “a framework of rusting, corrugated iron and a wire fence, [which] vividly suggests a decaying end of empire location, a military stockade behind which Othello and his men retreat.”
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The army barracks become a microcosm of Venetian life isolated within enemy territory. Trevor Nunn’s production in 1989 also hinted at the tensions outside the barrack walls:
… costumed by Bob Crowley in a style suggestive of Chekhov crossed with the American Civil War…Watch-dogs bark, clocks chime, while in Cyprus—a place, we are reminded, with larger racial tensions of its own—the cicadas are periodically silenced not only by distant church music, but the muezzin’s call to prayer.
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The influence of the military on personality was vividly demonstrated in Trevor Nunn’s 1989 production, performed in the intensity of a studio theater, The Other Place:
Cyprus is clearly defined as a simmering colonial outpost where the women fuss over the barley-water while the men get on with post-war admin…[Ian] McKellen [as Iago] is the absolute embodiment of the professional soldier: every detail is correct down to the little baccy-tin for half-smoked cheroots and the obsessive way he tidies his barrack-room blankets.
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McKellen’s performance in 1989 was noted for this fastidiousness born out of army life:
Psychotically unable to tolerate disorder, Iago is perpetually tidying up the barracks, righting overturned chairs, pouncing on the litter. For this “model” NCO, the marriage of Desdemona and black Othello, an even more conspicuous irregularity in his world, naturally demands eradicating too…Unsmiling, the least jocular of Iagos, McKellen establishes no rapport with the audience—something of a feat in The Other Place—let alone the usual sense of complicity. In this terrifying performance, asides, like soliloquies, are private, echoing inside the desert of his head.
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This militarism and precision of Iago’s devices is what makes the man so chilling. In 2004, Antony Sher’s
knowing, nudging, darkly funny performance invites us to appreciate the intricate mechanics of destruction. And in his modern khaki his Iago looks like a chunky, florid blend of an Afrikaner cop and the moustached Hitler; but nobody could more subtly use concern, helpfulness, moral indignation and blunt soldierly decency to lure a man and a marriage on to the rocks. It’s awful and it’s impressive.
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A Woman’s Place
In a military world the role of women is marginalized, although clearly defined. As in John Barton’s 1971 production, the effect is to
isolate and make Desdemona more vulnerable, and the innate brutality of the play more obviously naturalistic.
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The daily life of an army on active service is as foreign and exotic to Desdemona as is her new-made lord. Any support from family, friends and the only society she has known as a gently-nurtured aristocratic girl is removed from her by her voyage to Cyprus, leaving her with only the intimacy of Emilia, whose allegiance is at least partially to her husband. Of course, to Othello the camp has always been the centre of his existence; but this particular camp environment is rendered unfamiliar by the presence of a wife.
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Women are by definition excluded from the battlefield and barracks. Kept in the bedroom and at the dinner table, they share neither the same experiences nor the same intimacies. No wonder the husbands…relate more intensely to their fellows than to their wives.
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In 2004, Greg Doran created
a predominantly male, militaristic society in which women are either romanticised or treated as whores. Lisa Dillon’s fragile, loyal, indisputably loving Desdemona wanders into this world like a rose waiting to be crushed. And Amanda Harris’s Emilia…is a perfect portrayal of the hardened service wife who has long learned to adjust to this brutal male ethos.
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The attitude toward women was portrayed as disturbingly misogynist:
The Venetian soldiers…are so sloppily dressed they look as if they’d have trouble controlling Mykonos, let alone Cyprus; but they’re a nasty lot, who punch Nathalie Armin’s harmless Bianca and push around the Islamic women who gather on cushions at the front of the stage or lurk behind steel netting at its rear.
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This issue of Iago’s repulsion toward physical contact with his wife has been played as disgust at her supposed infidelity, and as a homosexual leaning, but is also indicative of the redundancy of these women in a man’s world. Michael Attenborough’s attention to this fact was highly praised when he directed Othello in 1999:
The virtue of this production is that it creates a militaristic world where women’s needs and desires go unrecognised: the drinking-scene, in particular, is beautifully staged with the men engaging in bizarre quasi-homosexual rituals. And part of Iago’s tragedy is that he is so much a creature of this world that he sees women as little more than sexual objects waiting to be crushed.
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Of course, Iago is severely psychologically twisted; his view of everyone, but especially women, rancid with images of bestiality. One instantly pities Emilia. In 2004, what incited Antony Sher’s Iago was
a disgusted fascination with sex. Amanda Harris’s excellent Emilia, his embittered wife, repels him so much that his fingers move into strangling mode before they readjust into shoulder massage.
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His jealousy of Emilia is only proprietorial. Here…Harris’s performance brilliantly fills in the picture. She is tense and tired, smokes nervously, takes the odd tipple and is clearly bored to the gills with Iago’s wise-guy joviality and heavy-handed sex jokes. In this marriage, she is an object, but a dangerous object: at the end Iago stabs her in the genitals.
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In 1985:
The Emilia of Janet Dale is a marvellous study in rejected sexuality, canoodling her way for a fleet moment into Iago’s favour with the procured handkerchief only to find herself spun from the embrace in a premonition of [Ben] Kingsley’s “turn, turn, turn” humiliation of Desdemona which leads to a truly shocking slap on the face.
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At the beginning of the play, Othello’s demonstrative affection for his new bride distinctly marks out his behavior as different from the rest of his command. In 1999:
Military discipline and ceremonial are the façade cracked open by Othello’s infatuation with Desdemona. The obliviousness of Fearon’s Othello to the embarrassment of Lieutenant Cassio (Henry Ian Cusick) at his hungry fondlings of Desdemona on the quayside makes it more than usually credible that he should be so blind to Iago.
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As Iago’s poison works on Othello we see his behavior and language toward women change. Othello physically demonstrates the bestial behavior which Iago only thinks and talks about. They become two sides of the same jealous monster. In 1979:
Sinden conveys the ecstasy of jealousy with splendid conviction. At one point he is reduced to emptying his wife’s laundry basket and sniffing the sheets for evidence of copulation. And he carries the humiliation of Desdemona further than I have ever seen by threatening to tup her in front of Emilia and by hurling her contemptuously to the ground in front of the Venetian visitors.
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Shakespeare presents us with two women at either end of the scale, one who has suffered at the hands of a brute, and is worldly-wise through her experiences as both abused and army wife, and one new to that lifestyle and marriage. Imogen Stubbs as Desdemona in Trevor Nunn’s production was very girlish in nature:
There is an apt sense of Desdemona the daughter about this interpretation. Her teasing and cajoling manner is that of a favourite young girl playing up to her daddy. As well as emphasising the generation gap, it helps Iago when he opportunistically reminds Othello how she was false to her father in Venice in order to get away from his arms.
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hurling herself prematurely into an adult world, [Desdemona] is fragile, lovely, spoilt, manipulatively aware of her charm, and very young…On the quayside, waiting for Othello, her flippant exchanges with Iago reveal a deep uncertainty as to how a married woman ought to behave under such circumstance, and end in tears.
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The development of the relationship between Desdemona and Zoë Wanamaker’s Emilia in this production was given an added depth, poignancy, and focus. Traditionally, she is portrayed as the “warm, motherly Emilia,”
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but more recent productions have cast women with less of an age difference in the two roles. In 1989, the two women started out as strangers, Emilia being reluctantly assigned to the task of companion-cum-maid. This made better sense of the fact that Emilia doesn’t admit to Desdemona that the handkerchief has been taken:
[She] seemed to be jealous of a relationship which made her acutely aware of the inadequacy of her own marriage. When Emilia denies to Desdemona any knowledge of what has happened to the handkerchief, it can be an uncomfortable moment inconsistent with loyal friendship, but for Zoë Wanamaker it read powerfully as a moment in which she was prepared to have Desdemona suffer a little of the marital disharmony that for Emilia was habitual.
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The willow song scene acted as a breaking down of the divisions between the two women. At first reluctant to emotionally engage with this inexperienced girl, even pushing her arms from her when Desdemona hugs her for comfort, their shared experience betrayed a developing bond. In a clever piece of directing, the two women were linked in the final scenes by combining their voices. After smothering Desdemona with his hand, Willard White’s Othello lay back on the bed, distraught. Outside Emilia was heard calling gently “My lord, my lord.” In a voice almost spectral in its urgency and tone, Othello believed that he was hearing Desdemona’s voice, took the pillow and then smothered her again. As Desdemona struggled to utter her last words, Emilia helped her by completing her sentences.
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She berates Othello and as her own culpability is revealed she displays remarkable courage and moral strength. For Zoë Wanamaker, this was all the more powerful because of the absence of any easy sentimentality in her earlier relationship with Desdemona.
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Significantly, Emilia was left dead on the floor, ignored by those present, with no word of her sacrifice.
A Mind Diseased
On playing the role of Iago, David Suchet commented:
Actors seem to have latched on to one quality and played that—the smiling villain, the devil’s agent, the latent homosexual. Or you get the cold, objective playwright Iago, the one who creates the action. One thing I have discovered this first week is that any of those interpretations will work—up to a certain point. Then it would be a struggle to maintain it for the rest of the play. Studying the text very carefully one notices that Shakespeare himself has not got a clear line on Iago. If he had, it would be clear.
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Shakespeare endows Iago with a psychological condition beyond most people’s understanding. He gives no clear line with him because there
is
no clear line with a self-absorbed psychotic. The audience is taken on a disturbing journey into the mind of someone suffering a mental disturbance, and is left with the realization that the only genuine reason for his behavior lies in his own twisted nature, which is unfathomable. Actors playing Iago have picked up on certain elements of character that are evident in the text to give themselves an accessible psychological route into this dark void of a man.
Like many real-life serial killers, he shows one face to the world while being a completely different character underneath. He wishes to tear apart all that is beautiful, pure, and honorable. Bob Peck, who played the part in 1979, stated that Iago, completely aware of his own corruption,
seems to me to be a man whose life of deception and fraud is so repugnant to him that he can’t bear to see virtue, compassion, love or anything of positive moral good in others.
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Iago is a man who has structured his life on the principle that human beings are merely animals. For him, words like “nobility,” “honour,” “self-sacrifice” and “love” are shams…And yet Iago is not quite secure in his cynicism. Styles of life which argue against him constitute a personal affront. In order to preserve his own self-respect, to avoid becoming ugly even in his own eyes, he must either prove that they are hypocritical, or else destroy them. This is why he needs to turn Desdemona’s virtue into pitch, to make Cassio drunk, and to drag Othello down until he is speaking Iago’s characteristic language of “goats and monkeys” instead of his own.
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Bob Peck’s performance had picked up on the image of the tough, reliable, and jovial NCO. Like most modern Iagos, he spoke with a regional accent to indicate his class—and another reason for hatred:
Far from being an incarnation of motiveless malice, he is intensely jealous, crudely ambitious and utterly callous, a hate machine created by the slow, dehumanising process of professional warfare.
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He played the part with far more humor than usual, involving the audience and chuckling over his achievements, setting himself up from the start as the arch manipulator:
During Iago’s first major soliloquy, the one where he sets up the plan to destroy Othello and his rather shaky alibi for so doing, [Ronald] Eyre has the other four principals concerned. Emilia, Desdemona, Cassio and the Moor himself line up silently on stage behind him, so that Iago may view them almost as if they were waxworks before arranging them into his evil patterns.
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