Othello, Uncomplicated set, some what unsatisfying.

The what but not the why of the evil in men's hearts

MICHAEL POSNER

June 4, 2007

OTHELLO
By William Shakespeare
Directed by David Latham
Starring Philip Akin and Jonathan Goad
Rating: ** 1⁄2

Until Sept. 22 at the Tom Patterson Theatre


Two oak boxes, a few swords, a marriage bed, an embroidered handkerchief: These are among the few props and settings used in David Latham's clean, clear, uncomplicated but not entirely satisfying production of Othello, which opened at the Stratford Festival Saturday afternoon. The show stars Philip Akin, the first African-Canadian to assay the title role, and Jonathan Goad as the Machiavellian Iago, who orchestrates the Moor's destruction.

The setting and story are of course familiar. The noble Othello is a 16th-century war hero, defending the interests of Venice - for centuries the dominant military and trading power in the Mediterranean - against the expansionist Turks. His epic stories of the battlefield seduce the fair Desdemona (Claire Jullien), who manages to escape the clutches of her possessive father, Brabantio (Stephen Russell), and marry him. When the general is summoned to fight another battle with the Turks, besieging the Venetian colony in Cyprus, she follows.

Meanwhile, Iago, a high-ranking officer, is ostensibly offended by the promotion of a rival, Michael Cassio (Jeffrey Wetsch) and decides to plot revenge. By subtle means, he manages to persuade Othello that Desdemona has been guilty of adultery with Cassio - a suggestion that ultimately provokes the Moor to murder his wife, and to commit suicide.

Part of the continuing fascination with the play is that Iago's genuine motivation is ambiguous. The Cassio element is certainly there, but there are also hints in the text that he suspects Othello of sleeping with Emilia, his own wife; other hints that he is secretly in love with Desdemona himself, and still others that imply a reflexive racism. In his soliloquies, Iago spends a fair bit of time ruminating on how he intends to stage-manage Othello's downfall, making the audience complicit in his evil, but he is remarkably taciturn about motive, no more so than when the doomed Moor demands an explanation and, by the master craftsman of rhetoric is told, "From this day forth I will never speak word."

In a production as spartan as this, virtually everything rests on the power and credibility of the actors. As Othello, Akin works mightily hard to project both the Moor's essential nobility and the madness of the green-eyed monster, jealousy, that finally consumes him.

But too often I felt he was reciting lines rather than acting them. He delivered them in two distinct declamatory styles - one in a kind of staccato interruptus, with a pause between each emphasized word, and the second in a raging torrent of verbiage, the lines spilling over each other. This approach grew tiresome after a while and leant nothing to the ostensible, indeed the essential, goal of believability.

In Akin's defense, it must be said that Othello was and remains one of the most demanding roles in English theatre - requiring a huge leap from brilliant general and dedicated lover and husband to a man easily misled into jealous madness and murder by mere and unproven suggestion. Somehow, the actor has to make that transition plausible and I don't think Akin, labour though he does, quite gets there.

Goad, among the finest of the young Stratford players, offers us Iago in a striking and novel minor key. Cunning and determined, he is casual, almost flip with many of his lines, delivering them in a conversational style, almost at times throwing them away. In fact, with his back inevitably turned to half the Tom Patterson Theatre audience, they were often inaudible.

Claire Jullien plays Desdemona with a ton of heart, young but sincere in her love and understandably confused and distraught about the slanderous accusations made against her. (One picayune aside: the bed on which she dies, ostensibly her marriage bed, is too small; Desdemona's toes stick out over the edge under the sheet.)

I liked Stephen Russell's Brabantio, the outraged father, but he disappears from the text early in Act One and never returns. The only major actor whom I thought completely nailed the part - spoke with utter clarity and conviction, indeed commanded the stage when she was on it - was Lucy Peacock as Emilia, the wife who too late fathoms her husband's nefarious intent.

Kudos to John Stead for some well-staged sword fights, to Michael J. Whitfield for a cohesive lighting design that underscored the play's currents of darkness, and composer Peter Hannan for a haunting religious score that framed the action.

But over all, I found Latham's Othello to be an uneven production, compelling at times, but not able to extract and deliver the full, cathartic emotional power contained in Shakespeare's text.


Low-key tragedy built around star

By Richard Ouzounian
Toronto Star
Theatre Critic
OTHELLO
(3 out of 4)

By William Shakespeare. Directed by David Latham. Until Sept. 22 at the Tom Patterson Theatre. 1-800-567-1600

STRATFORD–Sometimes the man and the moment come together.

On Saturday afternoon, Philip Akin became the first black Canadian to play the role of Othello at the Stratford Festival. A historic occasion, marked by a solid and emotionally honest production of Shakespeare's tragedy.

One can lament the fact that it took 55 seasons to get to this point and that Akin's predecessors in the part included two African-Americans and three actors in blackface, including an Israeli performer whose cry of "Vife? I haff no vife," still echoes through the halls of infamy here.

But that's the past and what's visible today on the stage of the Tom Patterson Theatre for all to see is a clean and clear look at Othello with an all-Canadian cast.

Director David Latham has imposed no artificial period or interpretation on the script: He simply puts it up there with a solid cast of actors to do it justice. We follow rapt as the malignant Iago stirs his master Othello into a frenzy of jealousy that destroys the lives of a half-dozen people.

The end result is an often gripping piece of theatre which is only lacking one thing: the poetic grandeur that is part of Othello's magic. It holds you, it moves you, but it never reaches the stratosphere.

There are times you feel you could be watching a new TV show called CSI: Cyprus, written in blank verse. But that quibble aside, you will find much to cherish here.

Akin is a lean, saturnine Othello with a battle-scarred countenance that makes him slightly forbidding. You believe him both as a warrior and as a man who adores his newfound wife Desdemona with a great passion.

Where he falls down is as the poetic spinner of tales whose verbal felicity is enough to charm politicians and make women fall in love with him. Akin has every quality Othello needs except that grand sweeping voice that men like James Earl Jones have used in the role.

But Latham seems to have sensed this and built his whole production around Akin. Nobody else rants or raves, but they all speak with crystal clarity and a total sense of what their lines mean.

This method lets Jonathan Goad offer us a marvellously low-key Iago, a pure sociopath in action. Instead of sneering his venomous asides to the audience, he barely whispers them and the result is twice as chilling.

I defy you to take your eyes off Goad when he's on stage, and what makes his supremacy even more effective is that he's usually doing nothing but thinking and plotting. But what is more thrilling than seeing thought in action?

There's a warm, sincere Desdemona from Claire Jullien who escapes being the simpering victim we often encounter and Lucy Peacock is calmly restrained as Emilia, with sadness behind her eyes letting one suspect she knew what her husband Iago was capable of all along.

A solid, dashing Cassio from Jeffrey Wetsch and a believable Roderigo from Gordon S. Miller fill things out nicely, as do the simple but appropriate costumes of Carolyn M. Smith.

This Othello doesn't scale the ultimate heights of tragedy that the play demands, but it brings us further up the slopes than any production I've seen in recent years.

For that, a sincere thank you to David Latham, Jonathan Goad and – it goes without saying – Philip Akin.