Word: iago
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Othello traditionally requires two great actors to ignite, between them, the flaming poetry and the kindling passion of Shakespeare's tragedy. This British National Theater production, color-filmed on stagelike sets with a restrained cinema technique, is a one-man show that scants Iago to star Laurence Olivier as the Moor. London critics were overwhelmed by the almost inexhaustible resourcefulness of Olivier's stage interpretation. Archivists should cherish the film as a record of what happens when the greatest actor in the English-speaking theater attacks a famous, difficult role and stamps his genius upon it. Yet Olivier...
Under Director Stuart Burge, the supporting cast is pallid. Frank Finlay's Iago is a meager adversary in all respects. Maggie Smith plays a resolute and poignant Desdemona, though her open, clear-eyed virtue ought to vindicate itself as easily as Iago's obvious machinations condemn him. As Cassio, Derek Jacobi seems a snub-nosed, undergraduate type whom no lion among men could seriously consider a rival...
...Shakespeare's Iago...
Mitchell Ryan carries out the director's idea that Iago is motivated mainly by an aggressive homosexuality that does not even stop short of necrophilia. At first I did not think this approach could work without violence to the text; but it can, although it seems carried quite to excess here. The rest of the company is passable...
...main role has attracted so many players. (Kean, the foremost 19th-century Richard, started work on it at 13.) It is a "star" vehicle for virtuosity. Richard is not only an arch-villain; he is also a consummate actor himself, with an instinct for histrionics and theatricality. Like Iago (for which he served as a preliminary study), Richard takes as much delight in the efficacy of his acting techniques as in the evil deeds he commits (which include eleven murders...