Word: othellos
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...correct" Beethoven's and Chopin's "mistakes" as they used to. We should be allowed to judge a play just as the author left it, without the benefit of the director's superior insight as to how it ought to have been written. And, of all Shakespeare's plays, Othello is the one that most unhappily suffers cutting. The playing-time of this production is 165 minutes; the restoration of all the cuts would make the total running-time about three hours. Surely audiences now accustomed to four-hour movies and O'Neill plays can take three hours of Shakespeare...
...Othello of this production is Earle Hyman, whom local playgoers will recall for his excellent work during the past year in Saint Joan and Waiting for Godot. He is ideal for the role, if perhaps still a bit young. Handsome and six-feet-three, he properly cuts a figure of great physical and moral stature. A rich, sonorous voice is complemented by an extraordinarily expressive face as, going from calm imperiousness through tormenting doubts and jealousy to become a tragically pitiful uxoricide, the Devil's agent Iago gradually wreaks the havoc of his human lord and the heavenly Desdemona...
Hyman has played this role with the Shakespearewrights in New York and at the Antioch Festival in Ohio; it is obvious from his present performance that he has lived with the role a long time and knows exactly what he is doing. Most Othellos make the mistake of getting enraged too soon; consequently as the play progresses they try to bellow and shriek ever more loudly until the limit of intelligibility has been left far behind. But Hyman is careful to adjust to the big time scale of this process, so that the proper prolonged Beethovenian crescendo results. For, contrary...
...possible to have a good Hamlet almost in vacuo. But a good Othello is impossible without a good Iago, and vice versa. Alfred Drake shows here that he can excel in something besides musical comedy. He brings a welcome restrained maturity to the role, and we are spared the moustache-twirling, eyeball-rolling villain. Instead of black garb with cape, how refreshing to see Iago in a series of brown costumes! Although he occasionally indulges in too studied a pose, he handles his lines with nuanced variety, often spitting them out rapidly in keeping with Iago's lightning-quick intellect...
Jacqueline Brookes is fine as Desdemona, "the sweetest innocent that e'er did lift up eye." Her handling of the moments when she is slapped and bewhored by Othello is deeply affecting, and her dying words most touching. Olive Deering does well as the loose Bianca. But Sada Thompson's Emilia is too Desdemona-like; she ought to be sharply contrasted with her mistress--less refined, more common and blunt, at times even vulgar. I suspect the result would have been better if the Misses Thompson and Deering had exchanged roles...