The play may bear Othello’s name, but the new production at the Shakespeare Theatre Company is Iago’s. From the moment Jonno Roberts first appears on the nearly empty stage, the audience’s entire attention is his. Menacing, manipulative, and at times raging, he controls the stage, keeping an entire audience on the edge of their seats, even during some of his longer monologues.
Iago is a menacing figure, frighteningly subtle when he needs to be, yet containing a deep well of anger. Few actors can make Shakespeare’s curses resonate with the emotion, anger, and disdain inherent in contemporary four-letter Anglo-Saxonisms. That Roberts does so consistently is all the more credit to his acting.
In many ways, this is a very stripped down Othello. The costumes are simple, vaguely reminiscent of the First World War, with their khaki, olive, long skirts, and shirtwaists.
The stage is spare, as the actors have little to work with in the way of props or set pieces. A few camp chairs, a stray box or two, and, in the last act, the bed itself are the only pieces of furniture used. For much of the play, then, the movement of the various minor characters—the lieutenants and servants—takes on the choreography of a dance.
With these limitations, the play uses lighting to slowly increase the tension, building the pressure as the darkness creeps in toward the center of the stage. Iago plots and plans, crouched and under-lit, the darkness making him all the more sinister. Desdemona appears in white lace and light. When she sits in bed, hair unbound, waiting for Othello, she is an image of innocence the audience cannot help but pity. These might not be novel depictions, but they are classic ones, which continue to resonate no matter how many times they’ve been portrayed.
Shakespeare’s tragedies are great drama because they depict the falling of great men. As Iago says, “men are men; the best sometimes forget.” Forget what? Their virtue, their prudence, perhaps their friends. And lesser men forget as well. This production is particularly strong in its depiction of the men Iago uses to complete his schemes, like Cassio, who laments that “men put an enemy in their mouths to steal away their brains.” Othello is the great man who falls to his passions, but many around him tumble for the same reason. Each is a personal tragedy and yet, together, they form a larger, more horrific scene. This is, as the Bard termed it, the “divinity of hell.”
