Balancing Acts

by Nicholas Hytner

  A man without a plan must watch with preternatural concentration for his chances, and if an actor is entirely absorbed in what’s unfolding in front of him, he can impose his vigilance on the audience. Spotting the disgraced Cassio lurking with Desdemona outside the office, Rory starts drip-feeding suspicion into Othello: “Ha? I like not that.” Finding his wife, Emilia, with Desdemona’s handkerchief, he forces her to give it to him and within a couple of minutes he is improvising an elaborate proof of Desdemona’s adultery around the handkerchief. But, instinctively, he knows not to move too quickly, and keeps back the physical evidence until he can use it most effectively. Flying by the seat of his pants, he leaves it in Cassio’s room, and waits for his break. Then he persuades Othello to hide in a toilet cubicle to overhear him engage Cassio in crude locker-room banter about the local woman he pays for sex. When the woman herself appears with the handkerchief that Cassio has found and given to her, Rory’s eyes nearly pop out of his head: he can hardly believe his luck. But he pounces like a cat, and the audience is onto it with him, entirely implicated in the escalating malevolence of an ordinary man with a grievance who lets it run out of control. As he has no exit strategy whatsoever, the flood of dishonesty inevitably washes him away in its wake. You can see Rory start to panic as it engulfs him. As he is led out of Othello’s quarters by the authorities at the end of the play, he turns back to look at the three corpses on the bed, stunned at the apocalyptic issue of what started as a sordid act of petty revenge.

  Othello’s disintegration, in Adrian’s hands, is as terrifying as anything I have witnessed on stage. To a high degree, his life until his collapse is a performance, but whose isn’t? There is much in Othello’s background that seems remote to most of us: he was a slave, then a child soldier, and has since been commissioned from the ranks and reached the very summit. But anyone who has ever felt out of their depth at the top table will recognise what he does with the Venetian Senate to buoy up his performance:

  Rude am I in my speech,

  And little blessed with the soft phrase of peace…

  And therefore little shall I grace my cause

  In speaking for myself.

  Surrounded by those born to rule, he apologises for himself before going on to speak in a manner so extravagant that you know it’s a cover. Adrian’s Othello, though a mighty general, is all of us. His construction of himself is a reminder of how shaky are the foundations of the self we send out into the world. He gives Iago a lot to work with.

  He’s also black, but Adrian and I agreed from the outset that his race is only part of his identity. We rejected centuries of performance tradition that insisted that race, or even racism, is the play’s primary subject. The Venetian Senate appoints as its commander-in-chief an African general without even pausing to comment on his race: Venetian oligarchs always appointed a foreign mercenary to command their forces as they were wary of giving too much power to a member of their own elite. The same Venetian Senate, in The Merchant of Venice, allows Portia to stitch up Shylock. The same Venetians ascribe everything bad about Shylock to his being a Jew, and can barely let a moment go by without spitting out the word Jew as a term of abuse. But when they refer to Othello as the Moor, they use the term chiefly as a descriptor, the way Hamlet is called the Dane. There are racist characters in Othello, but all three have good reasons to hate Othello. Iago hates him because he’s passed him over for promotion. Roderigo hates him because he’s married his girl. Brabantio was once Othello’s friend and colleague, and is the father of the teenage girl whom Othello has secretly and suddenly married. All three express their hatred in terms that now seem unpardonably ugly, but their racism appears not to be part of the social fabric.

  By the nineteenth century, race had become virtually the play’s only subject. Critics and audiences assumed that everything Othello is and does is because he is black. The National Theatre’s 1964 production of the play still accepted that Othello’s murderous jealousy was a return to his innate African barbarism. Old traditions die hard. Several recent productions, mired in the nineteenth century, have presented Othello as the exotic other, ear-ringed, with a thick African accent. At the Hamburg Schauspielhaus in 2005, he was a white actor in grotesque black-face, strutting through a series of horrible racist stereotypes, now James Brown, now Michael Jackson, a portrayal offered as an ironic commentary on the play, but still fixated on the colour of Othello’s skin.

  This isn’t what Shakespeare wrote. Othello is vulnerable to Iago and insecure in his marriage for many reasons. He’s a career soldier, never before married, unable to see in his young wife anything other than perfection. Women are a mystery to him. Desdemona is less than half his age. She’s from the ruling class, and he is ill at ease with Venice and its inhabitants, “super subtle Venetians,” as Iago calls them. He’s a soldier among civilians, a stranger among Venetians, a middle-aged bachelor in a whirlwind romance with a teenager, and also a black man among white men. When he starts to have doubts about Desdemona’s fidelity, he lists some of his insecurities:

  Haply, for I am black,

  And have not those soft parts of conversation

  That chamberers have, or for I am declin’d

  Into the vale of years (yet that’s not much)

  She’s gone.

  In his first attempt to understand what’s happening to him, he worries about being black, but no more than he worries about being a crude conversationalist and about being (not very) old.

  Adrian and I wanted to return Othello to a world where it wasn’t bizarre or unimaginable for a powerful soldier to be black, and to restore the emphasis of the tragedy as much onto Othello’s internal landscape as on the tension between him and the world he has worked so hard to be part of. As Rory kicked away everything that supported Adrian’s self-assembled identity, as Adrian writhed on the washroom floor, he returned to a barbarism that was not innately African but innately human. He was capable of murder not because he was the other, but because he was us.

  The naturalism and immediacy of both Adrian and Rory were in part the consequence of their readiness to open themselves entirely to the extremes to which we are all capable of being driven. They were also a function of their command of the medium through which they told their stories. Both have the physical and vocal capacity to express whatever they think, whatever they feel. And they have the same basic approach to the speaking of Shakespeare’s text, an approach that I encouraged in all the actors who joined the National to play Shakespeare.

  There is no mystery about it. “Verse speaking” is not a special skill distinct from acting or speaking comprehensibly, neither of which come easily without training and experience, but both of which can be torpedoed by fear of the iambic pentameter. Shakespeare demands what should be habitual fixations for any actor: relish for what you speak, delight in your own imagination, belief in your own articulacy and the emotional capacity to take yourself apart. He asks you to think before you feel: emotion is the consequence of thought. Nobody cares how deeply you feel if you get stuck in an emotional rut: we’ll be bored if you aren’t as volatile as your character is. Very often, you’ll find that Shakespeare helps you by using a clear rhetorical structure, or by writing a smooth five beats a line, and when the sense of what you’re saying pulls against the regularity of the beat, he’s helping you by allowing you to exploit, if you want to, the tension between the sense and the rhythm, because only an idiot would say to be or not to be that is the question.

  So understand what you’re saying, say it like you mean it, and use the rhythm if it’s there. It doesn’t matter if you don’t know what a caesura is, because you’ll probably be observing a short break in the middle of the line anyway, by speaking the sense of it. Don’t make a meal of it: you’ll have heard how important it is that every line should be “new-minted,” as if you’re discovering it for the first time, but if you stop to find the thought every time you want to say something, we’ll be here all night. On the other hand, don’
t speed through it as if speed is inherently virtuous. Give yourself time. Life ebbs and flows. If you go fast just because you’ve been told to go faster, we won’t understand what you’re saying, and we’ll be bored. Make sure you can be heard, but don’t shout. Acquire and beget a temperance that gives smoothness to your passion, suit the action to the word, the word to the action, and all the other relentlessly quoted balancing acts that Hamlet urges on the Players: he may be an amateur but he’s right. He never mentions “verse speaking,” by the way, because whatever else he is, he’s never pompous.

  In Act 3 of Othello Shakespeare writes this bleak little exchange for Iago and his wife, Emilia:

  IAGO: How now? What do you here alone?

  EMILIA: Do not you chide: I have a thing for you.

  IAGO: You have a thing for me? It is a common thing.

  EMILIA: Ha?

  IAGO: To have a foolish wife.

  EMILIA: O, is that all? What will you give me now for the same handkerchief?

  IAGO: What handkerchief?

  EMILIA: What handkerchief?

  It’s a close-up of an abusive marriage, in entirely naturalistic prose that’s almost Pinteresque in the way it catches the cadences of the bully and the bullied. Scarcely five minutes later Othello is swearing vengeance on Desdemona:

  Like to the Pontic sea,

  Whose icy current and compulsive course

  Ne’er feels retiring ebb, but keeps due on

  To the Propontic and the Hellespont,

  Even so my bloody thoughts with violent pace

  Shall ne’er look back, ne’er ebb to humble love,

  Till that a capable and wide revenge

  Swallow them up.

  The second follows from the first, the grubby theft of the handkerchief leading to the volcanic flow of Othello’s jealousy, the blunt prose of the loveless marriage morphing into extravagant iambic pentameters. They call for the same acting process. Rory and Lyndsey Marshal as Emilia found their monosyllabic muttering in a loveless relationship. Adrian had the voice, the range, the long, long breath control for his extravagant oath; but the language scorched because he was immersed entirely in a self-invented man who reached spontaneously for a wild Homeric simile. It was the inevitable consequence of the performance Othello gives to the world, which includes the projection of himself as classical hero. When he can no longer sustain the performance, the words stop coming, language comes apart, and Othello loses consciousness:

  Lie with her? Lie on her? We say “Lie on her” when they belie her. Lie with her! That’s fulsome: handkerchief—confessions—handkerchief…It is not words that shakes me thus. Pish! Noses, ears and lips. Is’t possible? Confess? Handkerchief? O devil! (Falls into a trance)

  Othello ends with an act of shocking domestic violence: on the Olivier stage in the cramped bedroom of a bleak Corimec prefab. Othello and Iago both murder their wives before Othello stops the play for one last symphonic deluge of words that climaxes in his suicide, his final act of self-invention. But the two wives in Othello die as victims, cut off mid-flow as they struggle vainly to force their husbands to accept the truth. In yet another play about soldiers, the fourth I’d done at the National (Henry V and Henry IV Parts 1 and 2 were the others), the women are collateral damage in the collision of two men.

  At least they have voices independent of their husbands, an advance on the other three plays, even if their worlds are circumscribed by their marriages. In Olivia Vinall and Lyndsey Marshal as Desdemona and Emilia they had interpreters who refused to be mere sacrifices. Sharing a beer outside the prefab on the night of Desdemona’s death, they spoke not just as resilient army wives but as defiant survivors of abuse. “How goes it now?” asked Lyndsey as Emilia. “He looks gentler than he did.” Only a few hours after she saw Othello hit Desdemona, she wanted to tell her that she knew what it meant to be stuck in a violent relationship. They allowed the night to envelop them, then Olivia asked:

  Dost thou in conscience think—tell me Emilia—

  That there be women do abuse their husbands

  In such gross kind?

  Are you kidding, of course there are, and a good thing too, the men deserve it, said Lyndsey. Though in fact she said:

  There be some such, no question…

  Let husbands know

  Their wives have sense like them…

  Then let them use us well: else let them know

  The ills we do, their ills instruct us so.

  But such was the command of these two actors over the text, that the audience heard it with kitchen-sink immediacy. They also heard it as it was: the 400-year-old conversation of two tough, articulate and exceptional women. Bridging the gap was what we aimed for every time we did Shakespeare.

  I am fonder of Much Ado About Nothing, which I did in 2007, than any of the Shakespeare I have ever done, maybe because Leonato’s house in Messina is an almost testosterone-free zone. Locker-room machismo only arrives with Don Pedro’s army: a band of mercenaries, presumably recruited from all over Italy, commanded by a Spaniard on behalf of the Spanish crown, billeting itself temporarily before further action. The first instinct of Leonato’s Sicilian household is to throw a party: you don’t get the impression that it is in any way incomplete before the army arrives. It seems content and at ease with itself. It’s quite hard to negotiate through the first forty-five minutes of the play without repeated gales of phoney stage laughter.

  On the one hand, I said to Vicki Mortimer, this is the least fantastical of all Shakespeare’s comedies: no fairies, no forest, no separation of twins by tempest. But on the other hand, if we bring too much of the reality of the present into it, we’ll have to ask too many questions about the war this army has just fought. The play isn’t about war; it isn’t even much about soldiers. Don Pedro’s army is a narrative convenience, a way of bringing unattached men into a house full of women. It needs a real household.

  And Vicki and I were very taken with what Peter Holland pointed out to me about the three-way pun in the title. It’s much ado about nothing, as in nothing worth making a fuss about. It’s much ado about nothing, as in no thing, the Elizabethan slang for vagina. And much ado about nothing, as in noting, one of the ways the Elizabethans pronounced nothing. None of this will be much ado to a contemporary audience, but the third pun is a big clue. The failure to note properly, to look properly, to listen properly is what the play’s about. Virtually every man in the play gets it wrong: Antonio, Borachio, Leonato, Benedick, Don Pedro and Claudio all think they see something, but they’re not looking carefully enough. The main plot is about the terrible consequences of not looking, not engaging: the young officer Claudio proposes to the beautiful Hero, daughter of Leonato, after a whirlwind romance, and then throws her over at the altar after he thinks he sees her at her bedroom window making love to another man. It never occurs to him to ask her about it. The subplot, the more famous romance, is between Beatrice and Benedick, who apparently despise each other, but they learn to see each other warts and all, and so love each other.

  The National’s Much Ado came from one of my frequent conversations about Shakespeare with Simon Russell Beale. Our warm friendship seems often to exist through Shakespeare, even though we’ve done only two of his plays together. Either one of us could have suggested it, and I have no memory which of us it was. We knew we’d try to persuade Zoë Wanamaker to do it with us at the same time as we knew we’d do it. We knew that, although there’s nothing in the text to suggest what age they are, Beatrice and Benedick would be in advanced middle age, and that the play would to some degree be about us. I knew that once again Shakespeare would hold the mirror up not just to nature, but to myself. Simon knew the same thing. Neither of us would deny our Shakespearean solipsism. We know ourselves through Shakespeare.

  Beatrice and Benedick, like everyone in Shakespeare, are as much a revelation of their actors as they are of the playwright, who gives them far less to play with than you’d imagine after seeing a decent production. B
enedick has 161 lines and Beatrice has 111. Hamlet has over 1,000, and that’s still not enough for him to let us know all the stuff that an actor must decide for himself. The actors playing Beatrice and Benedick have to create a whole history for themselves, as the playwright says almost nothing about the origins of the palpable pain that they cause each other by being in each other’s presence.

  This isn’t faulty playwriting: it’s another of Shakespeare’s sure-footed acts of trust in his actors to complete the job for him. Zoë and Simon built a detailed past for themselves, based partly on the hints about it that are dropped in the play, partly out of their own intuition and experience. They assumed that theirs was a long friendship; that at some stage Beatrice read their deepening friendship as blossoming love; that she pushed too hard and that Benedick did a runner. Benedick, we assumed, was a greater coward than Beatrice. And the memory is still raw. These secret histories are essential actors’ tools, never intended to be legible to an audience, but the foundations for suggestive, fully human performances. Zoë and Simon’s history kicked in from their first exchange, which is often and effectively played as a public performance, the opening sally in a prototypical battle of the sexes.