Word: othellos
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More Art than Farce. An old silent movie flashes onto a screen. An unfaithful wife shoves her lover into a large armoire when her husband unexpectedly returns from a business trip. A second screen lights up. On it, Othello is about to strangle Desdemona, her cleavage akimbo. Screen 1: the wife shoves the armoire out of sight to hide it, but ends by shoving it right into Screen...
...jealous Moor opens the armoire. He discovers the enclosed lover, who emerges and shoves Othello, first on film, then live, across the gap and onto the other screen. The husband returning from the business trip now finds Othello in his wife's armoire. Farce to be sure, but so neatly coordinated that its humor is as artful as it is foolish...
Olivier had always avoided Othello because he did not think he had the voice for it; also he considers it an all but unplayable part. He imagines Shakespeare having a drink with the great actor Richard Burbage and becoming fed to the teeth with Burbage's bragging that he could play any role at all. "I'll fix you," says Olivier's Shakespeare, who goes home to write Othello...
...boomed and bellowed at the rehearsal hall's rafters until he had amplified his "rib reserve." He soaked himself in potassium permanganate, but that failed to darken him sufficiently, so he settled in the end for coal-black grease paint. He tightened the spring in his stride, explaining, "Othello should walk like a soft black panther." He practiced the curiously accented, oddly stressed speech that evoked the way some Jamaicans and Africans gush English, managing thereby to convey the way the Moor spoke Italian...
Olivier saw Othello as a man not blind to lago's ambitions but only to his stratagems, realizing them too late. Interpretation, however, was only the door to his triumph, which reached its height in the Moor's eruption of jealousy and murderous violence. Said the Financial Times's Alan Dent: "He is like a lion caught in a cruel trap." In the Daily Mail, the often appreciation-proof Bernard Levin said that "Sir Laurence's Othello is larger than life, bloodier than death, more piteous than pity...