Recent productions of ‘Othello’ have been marked out by their Iagos rather than their Moors, as in the case of Ian McKellen, Simon Russell Beale, and Antony Sher. Chiwetel Ejiofor’s great achievement is to put Othello centre stage once again in a performance of great sweetness, charisma, and finally madness. Ejiofor speaks sonorously and moves sensuously, further setting himself apart from the Venetians and making his marriage to Kelly Reilly’s Desdemona more surprising and thus more vulnerable. He can take the racist insults, but all too easily falls prey to Iago’s suggestion that his wife is sleeping with Cassio (Tom Hiddleston, excellent).
But it’s not Ejiofor, rather Ewan McGregor as Iago who is the major draw for this production and has made it such a hot ticket. And yet although he has clearly worked hard to achieve clarity on stage, McGregor lacks Iago’s complexity. At least his good looks mean that you can understand why everyone, not just Othello, is so easily taken in – both Cassio and Desdemona disastrously put their faith in him. And yet his horrific and devious plan is not carefully conceived, but rather impulsively dreamed up as he splashes through the puddles.
Being so domestic, it’s the perfect play for a studio theatre and Christopher Oram’s set ravishingly evokes Venice and Cyprus without recourse to clichés: the former by a mottled wall behind a watery gauze; and the latter with two Moorish windows through which Paule Constable’s lighting streams. Adam Cork’s sometimes barely perceptible music also adds to the atmosphere. Grandage’s tight production sticks to the costumes of Shakespeare’s time, with no fancy concepts, but rather focusing on the intricacies of the story in which a sensuous, young woman and an honourable soldier are destroyed by a vicious ensign. It’s almost unbearably sad – and even sadder that, because there’s apparently no possibility of a transfer, so few people will see it.
