Theatre
Reviews
OTHELLO Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh. until Sat 20 Nov 0...
Over the last century or so, we‘ve become obsessed with the need to explain the behaviour of those around us. No piece of petty vandalism, no minor theft, no act of kindness, for that matter, is left without complex sociological causalities. So it is that when we think of Othello, we tend to mediate with discursive apology acts and events that the Jacobeans were more brusque about. There are reasons why Othello is compelled to be good, certainly, but Iago is bad, because he’s bad, because he‘s bad, dude.
Mark Thomson‘s production displays a canny Iucidity about this, placing the play in a 19205 world where a movement into national crisis allows for the state‘s abuse of liberties of its own citizens; for all the semi fascist uniforms on display we might still observe some alarming resemblances to our own world. But Othello (Wil Johnson) is still noble and jealous, Desdemona (Claire Yuille) still devoted and increasingly mystified and Iago (Liam Brennan) still a scheming monster. This latter has good deal of fun at the expense of Cassio (Steven Duffy), who‘s still admirable but intemperate, and Roderigo (Richard Conlon), who’s still a dag.
Brennan‘s Iago is astonishing. He exposes the complex binaries of the Pleasure Principle, bringing the
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audience in on his infamies with conspiratorial asides, and endless witty ticks and nuances. It’s a performance in which not a second on stage goes spare, where the audience is brought into furtive, vicarious titters by each new misdeed, acknowledging its own complicity in misbehaviour. As with Arthur Daley and Terry McCann, or Satan and God in Paradise Lost, we spend a good deal of time awaiting the bad guy’s next appearance, empowered by his own sense of power in his rambunctious roguishness. We can explain the character well as a study in sociopathy, whose disaffection and greed drive him on, but, actually, he’s just a bad ass mofo.
Yet in front of Francis O‘Connor‘s pillars and semi- tropical spaces, wonderfully lit by Davy Cunningham, the cast is generally very strong. Special mention might go to Eilidh Fraser for her Emilia, a small but important study in moral ambivalence, captured with real astuteness through movement and diction. Wil Johnson's Othello, a minoritised man who has had to be better to simply be equal with his fellows, brings out the crisis of the inexplicable, the prerational of pure love which cannot be explained in the rational world in which he operates, and is therefore catastrophically destructive. It’s not flawless, for at just upward of three hours, it needs some trimming, but it’s a splendid night’s entertainment. (Steve Cramer)
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Miss SAIGON King's Theatre, Glasgow. until Sat
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