Heavy on Tragedy, Light on the Bard; Shakespeare has Nothing on this Othello
Othello
CBC
The National Post
CBC's adaptation of Othello, The Tragedy of the Moor, is handsome, intelligent and -- inevitably -- limited. Some of the limitations are literal; a lot of the Shakespearean text is gone, including nearly all the long speeches.
Carlo Rota's Othello doesn't get to describe his wooing of Desdemona, or to rebut the charge of having bewitched her; indeed, no such charge is made. When his jealousy kicks in, his farewell to his military identity is reduced to a single line: "Othello's occupation's gone" has gone.
He doesn't compare his own implacability to that of the Pontic sea, though implacability turns out to be something that Rota is good at. There's no willow scene; which is tough on the story's two leading ladies. Even Othello's sacrificial approach to the killing of Desdemona ("it is the cause") is abbreviated. What gets lost in all this is the sacramental aspect of the play and the character: The key reason for his actions seeming not credible but also blasphemously misguided.
Which is strange in a way, because this production implies a religious conflict that isn't there in the original. Though many of the play's words have been cut, only one has been changed: The derogatory "thicklips" becomes "Muslim." This Moor of Venice is ethnically correct as he isn't in Shakespeare, to whom "moor" just seems to have meant "black."
After decades of being told that only black actors can play Othello (the truth is that few actors of any race can play him) it's piquant as well as impressive to see him played by the racially inscrutable Rota: British-born and accented, Canadian-based and currently best known for Little Mosque on the Prairie.
Rota usually projects a humorous self-awareness that should be all wrong for Othello, but turns out to be all right. He establishes authority without effort ("put up your bright swords") and seems very sure both of himself and of his love.
Iago has to work very hard to crack that shell; some clever adaptation (by Matthew Edison and director Zaib Shaikh) makes it seem a longer, more varied and gradual process than it is in the theatre. The temptation takes place over a buffet-lunch; when the dam is burst, Othello finds an outlet in hacking away at a joint of meat.
A terrible logic, unfounded but unstoppable, takes over the two scenes in which he abuses his wife as a whore. His last speech is left intact; in fact we hear it twice, at beginning and end. (The play is a flashback.) And with it we reach greatness. Rota lays out the facts of the case calmly, sanely, tormentedly; it seems he'll go quietly.
And when he whips out his knife and kills himself, it's total shock. It's a long time since I've seen an Othello, on stage or screen, as good as this.
He couldn't be called the richest vocally: "Lie thee down and roar," says Emilia when the Moor discovers the truth, but roaring isn't in Rota's register. But then neither is it in television's, which effectively forbids shouting. The alternative method of conveying intensity is by whispering, and there's a lot of that here.
The cast includes a posse of Stratford Festival veterans -- Graham Abbey, Peter Donaldson, Jonathan Goad-- who can colour and personalize the verse at any volume; Abbey is the best Cassio I have ever seen.
The character most diminished is, unexpectedly, Matthew Deslippe's Iago, who ought to thrive on secrecy but here just seems furtive; he could be pegged for a villain a mile off. Losing the bulk of his soliloquies, he also loses any chance at a deeper demon-ism; he comes closest when laying his plans over a military map, moving the other characters around as if they were pawns -- which to him of course they are.
The show has been given a rich but indeterminate period look; there's nothing especially Venetian about its Venice (not a canal in sight) but its Cyprus is, if not Cypriot, then certainly North African. Othello should feel at home there.
Initially, indeed, he does, but he has brought his Venetian status as an outsider with him, and it makes him vulnerable. Since the casting entails omitting the insistent way in which everybody -- himself included -- refers to Othello as "black," we have to take his alienation to a large extent on trust. The concept, as so often when productions go all out for "relevance," doesn't quite fit.
For once, we have an adaptation that says less about racism than the original. To be fair, the billing merely says "based on the play by William Shakespeare." It doesn't claim to be the play. But the closer it comes, the better it is.