Though it would be pushing it to say Tom Morris directs Othello as a comedy, he certainly wrings more laughs than usual out of Shakespeare’s great comedy.
To be fair I don’t think I’d appreciated the extent to which previous productions I’ve seen had been using smart line reads to avoid giggles every time a character describes the villainous Iago – the greatest snake in English literature – as ‘honest’. Morris just cheerily milks it, and the result is a lighter-than-usual take on the play. Not out and out hilarious, but with a certain glossiness that speaks of a desire to go easy on a West End audience.
The title role is played by David Harewood, who returns to the part 28 years after he was the first Black actor to star as the doomed Moorish general at the National Theatre. His new Othello is a precise, confident, seemingly unflappable man who shows little sign of jealousy or doubt for a long time. But his extreme rationalism proves his downfall: once Toby Jones’s Iago presents ‘proof’ of Othello’s wife Desdemona (Caitlin FitzGerald) being unfaithful, her husband simply accepts it, something that speaks as much of misogyny as insecurity or insanity.
Jones is a thoroughly entertaining Iago, who tackles Shakespeare's elegant verse with a coarse vigour that helps explain why the other characters like him so much: he comes across as plainspoken, done to earth, and funny.
Why does he want to destroy Othello? Being overlooked for a promotion in favour of Luke Treadway’s dashing Cassio is the initial impetus. But it’s not clear Jones’s Iago even holds a serious grudge against Harewood’s Othello. He grins happily as his plan unfurls – the sense is that he’s mostly doing this because it’s fun. Some men just want to watch the world burn.
What Iago doesn’t seem to be motivated by is racism. The Venetian society of Morris’s production is racially diverse, and Iago’s guileless wife Emilia is played by Vinette Robinson, an actor of colour. Iago is hardly PC, but he’s clearly not primarily driven by racial prejudice. Which is interesting: the recent trend has been for productions of this play to be helmed by Black directors who overtly engage with racism as a theme. The fact that’s all totally swerved here doesn’t help with the sense of an overly light production.
It is slick and entertaining, though, with Harewood and Jones both highly watchable and speaking the verse with pin-sharp lucidity. Also good is FitzGerald as Desdemona. The character can often be portrayed overly young and overly drippy, but here she’s a self-confident middle-aged woman whose forceful attempts to reason with her husband only serve to underscore his refusal to afford her the same respect.
It’s a solid commercial show, but as recent West End productions by Jamie Lloyd and Robert Icke have shown us, you can get away with being quite a lot more daring than this when it comes to putting Shakespeare into a commercial theatre. It’s accessible, but very safe.
