How important do you see the age gap between Othello and Desdemona, and how did that affect your casting of the roles?TN: I had a rarely advantageous situation to build upon then, an actor to play Othello of magnificent handsome appearance, with a voice that stopped all other conversation the moment he entered a room, a man of international expertise and indomitable courage as he had conquered opera audiences around the globe.He was twenty or so years older than his Desdemona, an age differential that I think is absolutely fundamental to the play. The fact that Othello describes himself as “declined / Into the vale of years” reveals that he is conscious of being no longer young, having won a bride who is still very young and who, therefore, may have a ready disposition to exchange him for younger company. When he secretly marries Desdemona, Othello is already a national hero, famous, celebrated, a giant among pygmies. I have seen versions of the play where Othello is dashing, youthful, up and coming, and I have felt that what Iago does to him is of less consequence than the play requires, because the edifice that came crashing down was just not big enough, the destruction wrought was just not sufficiently impossible.MA: I’d just done Romeo and Juliet with Ray Fearon and Zoë Waites and they were absolutely breathtaking. Towards the end of our international tour I remember getting the two of them together in a hotel in Belgium and saying,“Would you like to play Othello and Desdemona?” And they both said, instantly,“Yes.” So the casting arose out of the fact that I’d got two really talented young actors who had this incredible chemistry. The big issue for Ray was his age [he was thirty-two at the time of the production]. To age his appearance he shaved his hair and grew a beard, and I did actually have to cut a line: “declined / Into the vale of years.”Some people commented on the fact he was too young. I think that’s just because they had inside knowledge that that is how the play is written. There is absolutely no evidence in the rest of the play that his age makes any difference at all. In fact, quite the reverse. I would say a younger man helps in terms of explaining his promotion and his leadership, and their effect on Iago, so I deliberately cast an Iago [Richard McCabe] who was older than Othello; it’s usually the other way around.But also Ray’s age undermined the conventional view of Othello as “Oh, he’s an old man, he can’t get it up and that’s why he’s vulnerable to Cassio.” There is no evidence for that. What I think is a much more interesting story to tell is that Othello is an emotional virgin. This is why I believe the question of color is less interesting. He’s a soldier, a raconteur, but he has never engaged in emotional relationships. Whereas an older man would have experience of this, a younger man would possess a certain naïveté; I think that’s what makes him so vulnerable to Iago’s plotting. So not only was I not making an excuse for Ray’s youth, I felt it was a positive advantage. I thought it made the audience examine the nature of his vulnerability beyond simply being an old man. Our Othello was virile and beautiful, very sexy, and he had a very physical relationship with Desdemona. Interestingly, whereas a lot of reviewers in Stratford said he was too young, several of them openly, clearly recanted when we came to London. Initially, they just couldn’t see beyond his appearance. Indeed, the London reviews were terrific.
Did you and your actors make any unexpected discoveries about Cassio and/or Rodorigo?MA: I didn’t really have expectations so I couldn’t tell you what was expected or unexpected. But I think that it’s true to say that I was quite shocked by how stupid Rodorigo was! A lot of the men in the play are totally governed by obsession. I think, for example, that Othello becomes addicted to jealousy. At one point he says,“Give me proof that she’s unfaithful.” He doesn’t say,“Please find out that she’s not.” It’s as if he wants this torment.“It is the green-eyed monster which doth mock / The meat it feeds on.” Rodorigo suffers from the same kind of obsession, which turns him into an idiot. When the truth is staring him in the face, Othello still can’t see it. When you think Othello or Rodorigo are so gullible as to believe Iago, you have to see it in the context of men who simply can’t see the world beyond Desdemona.8. Richard McCabe’s Iago was deliberately cast to be older than Ray Fearon’s relatively young Othello in Michael Attenborough’s 1999 RSC production.
I don’t think Cassio contained any surprises. I wanted him to be a different social class from Iago. I wanted him to be much more beautiful than Iago but still a soldier. There are images that echo each other through the play; this is another very emotionally immature person. His only relationship is with a whore whom he doesn’t visit very often. These aren’t grown-ups! Arguably the only real grown-up in the play is Emilia. Everybody else’s lives are very blinkered. I rather liked Cassio—I grew to like him more and more. There’s so much said about him, and actually working on him and rehearsing him you really felt sorry for him. But he is quite naive. There’s a lot of naïveté within the play, and a lack of sophistication.
What is revealed by Emilia’s speech at the end of Act 4 Scene 3 about how women as well as men have affections, desires for sport, and frailty?MA: I think it’s a speech about Emilia’s own relationship. It’s a desperately sad scene because they are just missing each other in the dark. Desdemona is being very selective with what she hears, and Emilia, who is a woman of the world, has seen it all in all its horror, is in a way warning her. And Desdemona is sort of sticking her fingers in her ears and going “La, la, la, I can’t hear you!” That’s the tragedy of that scene. I think it’s there because Iago is never going to tell you the truth about himself, but Emilia does. She doesn’t talk about other relationships. In fact what she says, rather as Shylock does, is “Do we not have affections too? Just because we’re put upon, it doesn’t make us insensible.” It’s the best statement about women in the past five hundred years! The scene’s prime function is to show us two very different female views of the world, and to give us insight into the Iago–Emilia marriage.
Critics worry about the play’s “double-time” scheme: looked at one way, the events are compressed over just three nights (with a gap for the sea voyage after the first act), but for Iago’s plot to make sense, a much longer span of time must pass. Why does this not seem such a problem in the theater?TN: Shakespeare uses the device of “double-time” scheme in many of the great plays. It’s not a mistake, it’s an intention, and it’s intended for theater performance, not for the scholar’s study. He creates an illusion of scale, distance, and the elapse of time suggesting epic, life-changing events, but in performance there must always be a sense of a narrative urgently moving on at a speed which can neither be controlled nor contained by the protagonists. Shakespeare also uses anachronism as a device, so that his plays can be set in an ancient and contemporary world at one and the same time. Cleopatra playing “billiards” in ancient Egypt, Gloucester not needing “spectacles” in ancient Britain are not oversights but, like the street talk and slang abounding in the plays, spurts of contemporary energy for an audience engaged in the here and now of the drama.MA: I strongly suspect Shakespeare didn’t think about it very much. What he obviously did want to do was compress the timescale, so that in the three hours in the theater you are shocked by the speed at which things happen. If he were to give naturalistic explanations for events he would have to stretch it out and therefore the whole thing would be less shocking. It’s the shock of the speed and scale of Othello’s decline that creates the effect.
How did you and your designer set about creating the contrasting worlds of Venice and Cyprus, and of public versus private life?TN: Othello is the most domestic of the tragedies. We divided the play at a point where the handkerchief is dropped. As the second part begins, any one of four characters might have picked it up before, almost randomly, Emilia noticed it. A negligible small square of fabric becomes the deciding factor in a catastrophe of multiple deaths, terror, and the furthest extremes of emotional suffering. Shakespeare couldn’t be clearer. The climax of the play takes place in a bedroom. I was so glad, therefore, to be doing a small theater intimate-scale production, where the bedroom could be t
he size of a bedroom, and not, as we have often seen, a palatial space the size of two tennis courts, robbing Shakespeare of his messy, muddled, up-close revelation of what happens behind the locked doors of a marriage gone wrong.MA: One of the challenging elements in designing Shakespeare is that he wrote for a nonscenic theater, and therefore saw sequences following quickly, one after the other, changing location very swiftly. I remember Cicely Berry saying once,“There’s no pause in Shakespeare until the end of the play.” We tried very hard to keep the flow of things, so both Venice and Cyprus were quite spare; consequently, if you introduced an item of scenery it really had an effect.For Venice I wanted something quite magisterial and formal, not particularly decorative. I wasn’t concerned with a literal representation of Venice so it wasn’t very beautiful; rather it was elegant and spare. If I were to put another adjective to it, it would be masculine. The scene where Othello persuades the Duke and the Senators to accept the marriage was very formal. We chose early twentieth-century costumes because, like Trevor [Nunn], I felt that the military context was very important. The Duke and Brabantio were like the formal elders of Venice, in frock coats and in an elegant, very male setting, with a big long table, inkwells, and blotters: quite starchy.In Cyprus, although the setting is an army camp, it is much more sensual. So we wanted heat and light as opposed to coolness and elegance. I wanted something that evoked a camp, so there was no architecture. Robert Jones [the designer] had these canvas panels that came in and out so that you could completely shutter off the upstage area, or open the whole stage up. It could configure into different arrangements that would give you different locations. The great benefits of what he did were twofold. One, it was in quite a gentle, warm color that made it feel very sensual. If you backlit it you could perform shadow-play behind it. The other thing was that it seemed to me that there are several stunning moments in the play where you go from an incredibly intense and intimate scene into one where suddenly everyone is present: for example, Act 4 Scene 1, which begins with Othello and Iago, where Othello is absolutely losing his mind. Lodovico arrives with news from Venice and suddenly the stage is flooded with soldiers. It’s the scene in which he eventually slaps Desdemona. So from that intimate, awful, ferocious, locking-antlers quality which Othello and Iago have, suddenly everything flew out and we were in a public place and Othello was on public show; he was the army commander, and he was expected to act in a particular way and yet he was clearly cracking up. This places the audience in the position of being in on a secret about Othello’s internal life which the other characters aren’t aware of. That feeling of being able to go from a two-handed scene to a twelve- or fifteen-handed scene, at the click of a light switch, was really important.I also felt it was important that you got a strong sense of Emilia and, particularly, Desdemona being fishes out of water in Cyprus; that they shouldn’t, strictly speaking, really be there. So, for example, when Desdemona landed in Cyprus, she arrived with half a dozen hatboxes. She was an elegant, urban girl with a lot of money. It’s hot; there are a lot of soldiers, with sweat under their arms, and this girl arrives as if she’s gone to the Mediterranean on holiday! I wanted the increasing feeling that she didn’t know what to do with herself at the formal arrival in Cyprus. Should she join the parade? Should she watch the parade? During that wonderful scene where there’s the riot in the middle of the night, we played it that Othello and Desdemona were trying to consummate their marriage and are interrupted and he has to get up. He arrives bare-chested, holding a sword, and he’s clearly been disturbed from his love life. And she comes on covered by a sheet and all the men suddenly become aware that there’s a half-naked woman there. She was out of place. So although it was a very sensual place it was not there to accommodate sophisticated, well-dressed, wealthy, urban girls.
T. S. Eliot famously read Othello’s farewell speech (“Soft you; a word…”) as a deluded man cheering himself up. That’s a bit harsh, isn’t it? But on the other hand, there is an element of Othello, after having been stripped bare (“goats and monkeys,” “that common whore of Venice,” and all that), now protecting his image once again with the carapace of his poetic music?MA: I think that’s actually a half-truth. Yes, there’s no question that his assessment of what has happened is going to be different from ours. We wouldn’t appraise it in the same way. But I don’t think that necessarily means he is twisting the truth in a cynical or manipulative way. If you feel life draining out of you then you will say things that aren’t necessarily going to be gospel truth. But I do think that a lot of what he says in that last speech is true. In a way, what is awful about it is not the reconstruction of his image, but his bewilderment as his mind races. Othello actually says very little in that last scene. He is like a spectator. Now he has learned what really happened, he has to reassess reality. So the scale of what’s happening in his head when his life is draining away is colossal. I don’t think it’s anything manipulative or vain. I think it’s a man in a state of complete incomprehension and bewilderment. Like centuries of people since, he’s trying to work out why it happened. And Iago gives nothing away; he takes his secret to the grave. It’s a very hard speech to generalize about. It’s actually a man trying to find truth.
ANTONY SHER ON PLAYING IAGO Sir Antony Sher was born in Cape Town in 1949. After compulsory military service in South Africa, he traveled to London to train as an actor. He joined the Liverpool Everyman Theatre in the 1970s, working with a group of gifted young actors and writers that included Willy Russell, Alan Bleasdale, Julie Walters, Trevor Eve, and Jonathan Pryce, playing Ringo in Willy Russell’s John, Paul, George, Ringo…& Bert. He joined the RSC in 1982 and played the title role in Tartuffe and the Fool in King Lear. In 1984 he won the prestigious Laurence Olivier Award for his performance in the RSC’s Richard III. Since then he has played numerous leading roles in the theater as well as on film and television, including Tamburlaine, Cyrano de Bergerac, and Macbeth, as well as Shylock in The Merchant of Venice and Iago in the RSC’s 2004 Othello at the Swan Theatre directed by Gregory Doran, which he discusses here. He also writes books and plays, including the theatrical memoirs Year of the King (1985) and Woza Shakespeare: Titus Andronicus in South Africa (1997, cowritten with his partner Gregory Doran).
The play is called Othello and yet Iago’s is the largest part. Does that somehow make the role different from Macbeth or Richard III or Hamlet or Lear, where the journey of the lead actor and that of the play are the same?I don’t think it matters that the play is called Othello, yet Iago is the larger role—the piece is structured as a thrilling combat between two heavyweights. Iago may be the instigator of the fight, and Othello the victim, yet the two men become locked together in a deadly hold, dragging each other down to destruction. And so they share, equally, the journey of the play.
Unlike most of the big Shakespearean roles, Iago’s contains a large measure of prose as opposed to verse: is there something distinctive about inhabiting a prose mind?The fact that a large amount of Iago’s dialogue is written in prose became very useful to our setting of the play, which was a military base on Cyprus, mid-twentieth century. In this context Iago was a recognizably modern NCO figure—a rough-talking square-basher, a master of barrack-room banter, and one who knows when to break open the bottles and start the songs, a veteran serviceman, immensely popular with the troops, and, to the rest of the world, just “honest Iago.” This interpretation was much more available in prose than it would’ve been in verse.
Iago’s language is full of sexual imagery throughout the play. How much of a clue to his character does that give you?Iago can’t seem to open his mouth without some sexual allusion spilling out. You could argue that this is just the way soldiers talk, but there’s something odder, more perverse in Iago’s language. To him, having sexual intercourse is “making the beast with two backs.” Why this savage image? Perhaps a clue comes in his speech about Desdemona: “Now, I do love her too, / Not out of absolute lust—though peradventure / I stand accountant for as grea
t a sin.” Why does Iago have to reassure us that he could be lustful if he chose? We wouldn’t expect anything less of this supremely macho man. Is it that he’s impotent, and physically incapable of making the “beast with two backs”? Or is he sterile? Could these things account for his strange energy, his appetite for chaos, his nihilism? I’m not sure. I certainly based my portrayal on the idea of a man with a severe sexual hang-up, though I rather liked leaving this undefined.
Does Iago lie to the audience? Are we really supposed to believe his accusations about both Othello and Cassio cuckolding him?I don’t believe that Iago lies to the audience in his soliloquies. When he suggests that both Othello and Cassio have slept with his wife, Emilia, he thinks it’s true, so it’s no more like lying than Leontes’ accusations about Hermione’s fidelity in The Winter’s Tale. In fact, having previously played Leontes, I believe he and Iago are suffering from the same condition; medically it’s known as morbid or sexual jealousy, when someone becomes convinced, falsely, that their partner is betraying them. This possibility was enhanced in our production by Amanda Harris playing Emilia as a boozy, flirty army wife. We all felt that although the play is famously about one man consumed with jealousy, it’s actually about two. Iago seems as much under the spell of the “green-eyed monster” as is the Moor. I think the reason that Iago is so successful at duping Othello is that Iago knows about jealousy from deep within.“O, beware, my lord, of jealousy,” he says with real feeling. Earlier, talking of his suspicion that Othello has slept with Emilia, he says “the thought whereof / Doth—like a poisonous mineral—gnaw my inwards.” Iago is like a man with a highly contagious disease, who is determined to pass on the germs. This aspect of Iago was crucial to my interpretation. I totally reject Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s reading of the role, where Iago is simply possessed by some kind of “motiveless malignity.”9. Antony Sher as a morbidly “jealous” Iago with Amanda Harris playing Emilia as a “boozy, flirty army wife” in Gregory Doran’s RSC production at the Swan Theatre in 2004.
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