Word: moores
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...VIOLENCE? WE GOT 'EM FOR you, and in the King's English. As every teacher knows, kids won't touch Shakespeare unless he is made all hot and gaudy and R-rated. So let's get with it, moviemakers! If the Bard writes about a Moor who loves a Venetian lady, show them naked in bed together, and have Iago woo Emilia from the rear. If the subject is villainy on a royal scale, as in Richard III, cram the screen with ingenious murders. Everyone says that if Shakespeare were alive today, he'd have been a screenwriter. But would...
Oliver Parker's Othello is the more standard of the two, a solid reading that pulls out the stops on an easily played organ. This is, after all, a soap opera of the had-I-but-known variety. All the Moor has to do is ask his wife's servant, "Pray, did thee swipe fair Desdemona's hankie?" and the misunderstanding is resolved as smoothly as any episode of Home Improvement. But then there would be little allurement in the role for some of this century's most dominant actors...
NEAR THE END OF THE MOOR'S Last Sigh (Pantheon; 434 pages; $25), a madman holds the novel's narrator, Moraes Zogoiby, prisoner. The captor, an old but rejected friend of Zogoiby's late, flamboyant mother, demands a history of her family before killing its teller. "He had made a Scheherazade of me," Moraes writes. "As long as my tale held his interest he would let me live...
When Othello (Bashir Salahuddin) enters wearing a T-shirt, things only get a little better. Salahuddin plays the Moor consistently as a casual, soft-spoken general, but his voice is often too soft and always unemotional. As he presents his case before the Duke, Othello explains a little too calmly why Desdemona loves him. Later, when he loses his temper with the drunken Cassio (Jed Silverstein), Salahuddin gets angry too quickly and for too short a time...
Salman Rushdie made a rare pre-announced public appearance when he spoke at a Writers Against the State forum in London. "This is a very important moment for me, and I hope it will be the first of more such moments," the writer said. Then again, maybe not. The Moor's Last Sigh, Rushdie's new novel, has infuriated Hindu militants in India...