Word: othello
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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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...
That Orson Welles and Laurence Olivier both donned blackface in famous film versions doesn't mean no one else should try. Parker had the radical idea to cast a black man as Othello, and Laurence Fishburne brings an outsider's dignity to the role of Shakespeare's noblest chump. Irene Jacob is a lovely, sallow Desdemona, and Kenneth Branagh--looking bloated and rheumy, slithering snakelike on rooftops, whispering his venomous gossip as if it's his last confession--makes a fine Iago, a demi-devil working his cool wit to destroy those he might have loved...
Instead, "Othello" features an eclectic gathering of horrible effects. Othello first enters from beneath an electronic Bud Lite sign. The sound, though well-prepared, goes sour when whimsical musical moments and a garish announcement of the Venetian victory accompanied by disco lay waste to Shakespeare's play. Two guards, listed as "Mechanicals" in the program, wear expressionless masks, and the Herald speaks his lines in a deliberate monotone. Iago's deception of Othello occurs before a projection of Magritte's painting, "The Wind and the Song," and, before the first intermission, an actor walks onto the stage with a sign...
...directing that went into "Othello" seems to have been a question of caprice rather than care. However, director David Levine is not a madman with connections; everything strange in the production contributes to an overall distance between the audience and the stage. The questionable acting is probably intended to prevent the audience from identifying with any characters; and the annoying music, projections, and other directorial decisions all alienate the audience from a once familiar play...
Unfortunately, this successfully defamiliarized production of "Othello" is not a good one. Levine sacrifices both vicarious appeal and smoothness when he casts lago as a nice, boring guy, Othello as a quiet, badly-dressed general, and several minor characters as masked, "mechanical" bores. A sense of alienation is easy to achieve in theater. What takes more work is putting together a meaningful and entertaining play. Levine's "Othello" distances viewers "not wisely but too well" so well that the audience shrinks somewhat after each intermission...