Studio I: Othello

Barrie Rutter's indifferent Northern Broadsides production, which transfers to London from West Yorkshire Playhouse, really offers only one attraction: the opportunity to see whether comic Lenny Henry can successfully play it straight in his first attempt at Shakespeare. Henry's performance is thankfully no embarrassment. But it's no revelation, either. His thickset, towering physical stature makes some impact, and he speaks, in a voice of dark velvet, with clarity. Yet there's a mechanical quality to both his delivery and his movement that suggests studied competence rather than emotional inhabitance of the role. He shows us an approximation of Othello's rage, but far too little of his pain.

More eye-catching is Conrad Nelson's Iago, a nasty, sharp-featured, weaselly creature whose machinations are at last exposed at the play's tragic conclusion as he sits sniggering among the corpses. There's nothing subtle about this spitting, psychopathic portrayal, but it does at least relieve the workaday ordinariness of Rutter's staging, given a drab, vaguely nineteenth-century setting by Ruari Murchison. Solid, but decidedly unexciting.