Royal Shakespeare Company Advertising for Help
thoughts on shakespeare: Othello
the royal shakespeare company
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"And what," inquired one of Britain's more prominent theatre directors, "is the word on the street about the Royal Shakespeare?" He was asking me? Still, I ran down the list of rumored candidates for the most prestigious arts vacancy in the United Kingdom.
Terry Hands, current artistic-director of the Royal Shakespeare Company and associated with the RSC for as long as anyone can remember, is stepping down as of 1991; and his job is being advertised in the national press. Qualifications are vague ("a distinguished artist" is called for) and salary unspecified, though, as one actor acidly remarked, it will be large.
This public advertising is itself an unheard-of phenomenon; company power has previously been transmitted by a form of apostolic succession. However, the RSC is generally perceived to be in a state of artistic and financial disarray, and there is no inescapable heir-apparent within its bulging ranks of youngish associate directors.
There are fashions in these things. At the moment the company's successes are being used against it, cited not as encouraging signs of breakthrough but as sad reminders of past glories.
An outstanding success is Othello, directed by Trevor Nunn at the Other Place, the legendary shed that for more than a decade has been the company's Stratford-on-Avon studio space. It is about to be pulled down, supposedly to make way for a custom-built replica operative in two years' time.
It has certainly gone out in style. Nunn once directed a terrifying stripped-down Macbeth in this room; for Othello, scenting a different kind of writing, he has gone to the opposite stylistic extreme, setting the play firmly and with abundant physical detail in the nineteenth century.
Ian McKellen, who was his Macbeth, is now his Iago; where once he involved us in his surrender to evil, he now keeps us at a mesmerized distance from a man wholly immersed in it. Charming when he needs to be, lucid in dialogue and in soliloquy, he is still scarily opaque, giving no more away than Shakespeare himself did.
If there is a clue, it appears to be a corroded bisexuality; he can fascinate his wife Emilia without loving her, and he is himself dazzled by Othello. When he tempts the Moor with "beware, my lord of jealousy" the irony is that Othello is as yet free of that passion, while he himself is enslaved to it.
Iagos tend to come in two varieties, Machiavellian enchanter and bluff NCO; McKellen combines them. He recently played Hitler on TV, and has kept not only the malignancy but hints of the mustache. His power is that of the consummate parade-ground sadist: equally adept at bullying and coaxing.
Othello is Willard White, the Jamaican-born opera singer who played Gershwin's Porgy in Nunn's memorable production at Glyndebourne. This is not merely his Shakespearean but his straight acting debut, and though his tone never gives out, his phrasing sometimes does. But the essentials—pride, assurance, bull-like bewilderment, and the essential counterpoint of crudity and nobility—are all there, and the production, ruthlessly well cast, is craftily designed to cushion him. His Desdemona, Imogen Stubbs, seems at times excessively flirtatiously girlish but when she engages with Othello, pleading for the discarded Cassio with exquisite tactlessness, you feel exactly the qualities that have enraptured the Moor and will now destroy him.
Zoe Wanamaker as Emilia is a wonderful embodiment of rough-tongued loyalty; when she turns on Othello at the end—saying, as Granville-Barker once put it, all the things we have been longing to—she brings the audience's emotions to boiling point and a little over.
She is actually more moving than Othello himself. But maybe that is as it should be. The characters who get to us in Shakespeare are not the enthroned protagonists but the lesser figures who suffer with and for them. In which connection Clive Swift, an RSC stalwart from the 1960s, makes more of Desdemona's bereaved father Brabantio than any actor I have seen.
He is probably the only actor ever to make anything at all of her ineffectual uncle Gratiano. This doubling means that he has the rare privilege of announcing his own death: a minor heartbreak but one more element in the masterly orchestration of the last scene.
The production moves from its short season in Stratford to another at the comparably intimate Young Vic in London. All tickets are sold, but returns would be worth lining up for. Failing that, and for the world in general, it is due to be filmed, and will undoubtedly turn up on television.
There must be many who dream of Nunn's permanent return to the company he led triumphantly through the 1970s. It seems unlikely; most of his recent career has been devoted to giant musicals—Les Miserables, Chess, and assorted Andrew Lloyd Webbers—of which he has now three running on Broadway and four in the West End.
The latest is Webber's Aspects of Love, which has been given a sleek, cavernous production that sits oddly on what was surely meant as a chamber musical. Based on a novel by one of the Bloomsbury group, it is a daisy-chain of achieved couplings and frustrated yearnings. The crowning romance is between two people who, as far as the audience is concerned, have barely impinged upon one another. Once again, the new British musical demonstrates its indifference to dramatic design—and also its prefabricated idea of emotion: if you're in love, you sing loud.
The theme tune, Love Changes Everything, turns up in every situation, suggesting one of those old-time song titles with its second half in brackets: Love Changes Everything (But Nothing Changes Love). In the second half, though, Webber does manage one pleasing song in Rodgers and Hammerstein style that had me—for the first time at one of his shows—nodding my head and murmuring "nice".
In this context, Nunn's Othello, like his Porgy, is not only a triumph but a considerable personal relief. (And his next project, the resuscitation of The Baker's Wife, a U.S. musical that died on the road, is awaited with real interest.) For the RSC, if not Nunn, then who? Bookies' favorite is Adrian Noble, for some years the company's boy wonder, whose stock must have risen dramatically last week when his production of Ibsen's The Master Builder opened to almost unanimous raves.
Before that, he had given us The Plantagenets, latest in an honored line of Shakespeare marathons, being three plays carved out of the Henry VI trilogy and its sequel Richard III.
The pattern was set 25 years ago by The Wars of the Roses, drawn from the same sources, and some things remain unchanged across the decades: doughty barons, weeping queens, smoke-filled battles and identical-sounding fanfares. Plus the presence of a diminutive magnetic actor—Ian Holm then, Anton Lesser now—as crookbacked Richard, and Lesser succeeds, where his predecessor faltered, in making his play a true climax to the cycle.
Noble's staging, always inventive, reached virtuoso levels here. What was missing was personality, and even skill, in those around him; most of the same actors seemed a lot happier to me in Kaufman and Hart's 1940 romp, The Man Who Came to Dinner. British classic companies have a touching faith in the appeal of vintage
U.S. comedy, not always shared by British critics; this one was generally panned as dated and patronizing. It is indeed both those things, and I loved it.
These shows were at the operation's London end, in the unloved and unlovely Barbican. Meanwhile, the Stratford company, outside of the elite Othello corps, was being damned for incompetence. From what I saw, their main vice was simply inexperience; a lot of them, given the chance, are going to be good. In the enchanting Swan theatre, dedicated to the plays of Shakespeare's contemporaries, they kept me happy with Marlowe's perennially perplexing Dr. Faustus and Ben Jonson's Epicoene or The Silent Woman, bilious, hilarious, rare, and welcome.
One actor, David Bradley, an untrumpeted mainstay of the company for years, made Marlowe's devil and Jonson's misogynist quite the nicest characters around. You couldn't help warming to him because he was so good at what he did.
Whoever takes over, the RSC needs to be preserved. It is a national—at times, an international—resource that will not come again. It needs to regain its confidence in Shakespeare, whose plays are its identity as well as its trademark. And it needs to get out of the Barbican into a more welcoming London home. Almost any theatre would fit that description, but the ideal, in ambience and tradition, would surely be the Old Vic. Are you listening, Ed and David?
The RSC's founder, Peter Hall, has recently moved into the West End and set up a line from there to New York. His initial production of Tennessee Williams's Orpheus Descending, with an endearing bravura performance from Vanessa Redgrave, is now a Broadway success, and The Merchant of Venice follows shortly.
American Equity has finally agreed to let Dustin Hoffman's Shylock be supported by the British cast that supported him in London. New York will, I think, be proud of its favorite son. His is a quietly authoritative performance (not small-scale, as all the London critics had it), only overstretched by the rhetoric of the trial scene.
An initially listless production—with picture-book sets that can only be Hall's concession to the tourists, since they have nothing to do with his established Shakespeare style—snaps suddenly into life when Antonio, at their first encounter, spits in Shylock's face. It's like activating an electric field. Our sympathies go to Shylock (certainly no one else has much claim on them) and remain there.
To that extent it's a soft-centred production, but Hoffman himself never sentimentalizes. He suffers in piercing moments, but he hates at length—and I can report that in London both emotions carried cleanly and clearly to the back of the dress circle. His Willy Loman a few Broadway seasons ago was a virtuoso job: the performance of an actor with technique to burn. In his Shylock, everything is concentrated on the job in hand.