Shakespeare for all
Lloyd Evans
Romeo and Juliet Globe Othello Whitehall Theatre The Private Room New End
The Globe's Romeo and Juliet is a great laugh. Tim Carroll's light-hearted production finds comedy in unexpected places and, although it misses some of the play's tragic intensity, it has an irresistible sense of fun. I've never seen an audience at the Globe enjoy themselves so much. One for tourists not purists.
But the purists should be delighted by Gregory Doran's thrilling production of Othello. Antony Sher plays lago as an embittered and malevolent genius who manipulates, swindles and steals simply because hate is the love of his life. The production nods towards history without getting entangled in its coils. The costumes refer with deliberate vagueness to the late 19th century. The grandees wear tailcoats and fob-chains. The soldiers are done up in desert fatigues. Othello has a chunky general's uniform with fat gold epaulettes and a billowing cape. These flourishes are just enough to satisfy the audience that swords, and not guns, would naturally be worn with such costumes. This is an abiding difficulty with updated productions of Shakespeare. Here the solution is delivered with perfect good sense.
The text has been tweaked as well. Instead of 'ancient', an obsolete military rank, they use 'ensign', which has the same rhythm and meaning. Shrewd vandalism. 'Ancient' is confusing to modern ears. It sounds like an adjective and unless you're forewarned you keep having to stop and ask yourself what 'ancient' could mean in the context of an army hierarchy.
Sher's performance dips knowingly into the past. With his sand-brown uniform and toothbrush moustache he is not quite Hitler but he is close enough for us to enjoy the parallels. He manages the transitions beautifully from the public self, all eager and correct subservience, to the slippery fiend behind the mask. As you watch him you sense the same uneasy envy that you feel while reading a biography of the Fiihrer: 'What joy to be so evil.'
Sella Maake ka Ncube, a native of Soweto, doesn't quite grasp the loftier rotundities of Othello's rhetoric. I'm not sure if this was my failure to attune to his accent or his failure to attune to Shakespeare's. The more impassioned the role becomes the better he gets. 'Arise, black vengeance from thy hollow cell,' he recites like a tribal incantation, accompanying the lines with a rhythmic witch-dance, pounding the floor with his boots and swishing his arms like a machete. To me this looked strange, horrible and absolutely right. When lago kneels alongside him, pledging himself 'to wrong'd Othello's service', he half-sings his lines like a High Church minister at the altar. This weird contrast between the religious rites of Africa and Europe strikes an unusual and fascinating note in the play. It might even have been funny, but its effect was to unsettle you and to deepen the unnatural horror of what was to come.
The gruesome eavesdropping scene is handled with great skill. When Othello overhears lago and Cassio lewdly discussing a prostitute, he believes they are talking about Desderriona. As drama this is clunky and incredible, To cut it would inflict damage elsewhere so it has to stay, but it extorts a heavy price. It makes Iago's manipulations seem witless rather than masterful, and Othello comes out of it looking like a paltry and unheroic sneak. Their solution is to dim the lights and to hide Othello from both the audience and from the scene he is snooping on. With the star barely perceptible, the whole silly stunt is rapidly forgotten, and the play is allowed to move on towards its magnificent, appalling and exquisite consummation. I sat through the final act filled with horror and wonder, Exemplary.
At the New End Theatre, a new play with new themes. Mark Lee's The Private Room lights on a fascinating dramatic possibility at Guantanamo Bay. A lonely female soldier interrogates an 'unlawful combatant' picked up in Afghanistan. At first the proud young Talib refuses to speak to her. She taunts him by mocking his religion and when he finally pipes up he derides the moral squalor of the West. She responds enthusiastically. Between the slanging-matches they grow attached to each other. The glimmerings of a romance emerge. This would be enough for a play — two worlds colliding within a steel cell — but the writer is ambitious and wants to give us a wider portrait of America. When he strays outside the interrogation room, Lee becomes diffuse and predictable. Inside the cage, his writing is acute, resonant and full of surprises.
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