Word: othellos
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...What is Othello about? Sexual jealousy, most people will say at once. True, but it is also a play about miscegenation, about reason and passion, about different personal approaches to good and evil, about inferiority and superiority complexes, about the interaction of two kinds of unusual egoist, and about many other things. There is a whole universe in this play...
...Othello is, perhaps, the greatest work in the world," wrote that famous man of letters Thomas Macaulay. And nothing, I think, has happened in the century since to alter his verdict. Giraldo Cinthio's story of the Moor of Venice, his ensign Iago and his wife Desdemona has, in fact, been the source of several superlatives: it gave us Rossini's Otello, his finest serious opera; it gave us the best of all Italian opera libretti (by Arrigo Boito), which, when set to music by Verdi, became the supreme Italian tragic opera of the Romantic century; and it gave...
...Festival Theatre's artistic director, John Houseman, served as the director of this production. Clearly understanding the special demands of the play, he has avoided all the major pitfalls and most of the minor ones. For the constructive plan of Othello, Shakespeare's most masterly, and most daring, occurs nowhere else in the playwright's works. Othello lacks the usual extraneous trappings and non-essentials. We do not have here scenes of tension or conflict alternating with scenes of "comic relief"; nor do we have any separate sub-plots. Everything is directly related to the main current of the drama...
...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...