Word: lago
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...less accessible to modern audiences and actors. There are several reasons for this. To the contemporary playgoer, the Moor's marital jealousy is more amazing than it is convincing, and the evidence of the telltale handkerchief seems unbelievably flimsy. Today's audiences are also more interested in lago's psychologically obscure malignity than in Othello's open nature and loftiness of soul...
...part of Othello proves more a trap than a triumph. Seemingly a model of uncomplicated clarity, the role is replete with opaque ambiguities and calcified misconceptions. Apart from strangling Desdemona and killing himself, Othello initiates less action than any other Shakespearean tragic hero. Indeed, he often seems like lago's stringed puppet. His credulity makes him appear less than normally intelligent, and the rapidity with which jealousy races through his veins suggests that he is as much passion's fool as passion's slave. At the end of Hamlet, Macbeth and King Lear, the hero has discovered...
Special Vanity. The trouble lies in the fact that Gunn accepts Othello's image of himself. That image is one of soldierly simplicity and unflawed purity. On those terms, he is totally undone by lago's villainy. But in reality, he is chiefly undone by himself. A different sort of man would have been immune to lago's innuendos about Desdemona's sexual infidelity and the circumstantial evidence of the telltale handkerchief unwittingly supplied by lago's wife (Jan Miner). Othello succumbs to his panicky jealousy either because he is unsure of himself...
...anathema to her father in much the same way that a Montague was to a Capulet. But Roberta Maxwell conjures up a prim housewife somewhat baffled by a hubby with a bad case of the sulks. Sne achieves an affecting poignance only in her deathbed speech. As for lago, he should be Lucifer's child trailing a brimstone stench of evil, but Lee Richardson makes Othello's ensign seem more like a nimble, two-faced schemer from the ranks of middle management. Wisely and rightly, racial overtones are muted in this production, for Shakespeare was symbolically concerned with...
Into this amicable stasis Murdoch introduces a favorite character of hers, the mean, mysterious catalyst. This time it is a famous scientist named Julius King, who is a latter-day lago, if not the Devil himself. Arriving in London and finding his friends happy is too much for Julius. Playing on vanity, sowing distrust he labors suavely to link Rupert with Hilda's younger sister and Simon with himself. As the plot unravels, the book shifts from comedy to melodrama, to tragedy-a course few writers could control or sustain. Miss Murdoch nearly manages it, because her presence...