Othello

If Nicholas Hytner's decade and a half in charge of the National Theatre is to be remembered by a single show, this is the one to go into the history books.  Like Antony and Cleopatra, Othello requires two central characters of equal strength. It's no good if Othello acts Iago off the stage, or vice versa.  One of the reasons for the triumphant quality of this production in the Olivier theatre is the casting of Adrian Lester as Othello and Rory Kinnear as Iago.  Triumphant?  I can't think of any other Shakespearean production that has kept me on the edge of my seat like this one. 

Rory Kinnear is an actor who has grown in stature at the National over the past decade.  He turns Iago into a genuinely chilling villain, manipulative, cold-blooded yet restrained, who speaks with a slight estuary accent that betrays a man who has probably risen from the ranks into the officer class.  Lester's Othello has a patrician born-to-rule quality, combined with a tendency to extreme violence.  Rather than an uncouth military outsider, he is shown in act one (the Venetian scenes) as an officer and a gentleman, well tailored and quite at home in the corridors of power.  Venice is not Venice but Whitehall, and the military decisions on how to confront the latest Cyprus crisis are taken in an anonymous conference room equipped with jugs of coffee and stale sandwiches. Visually, this production mirrors the contemporary military setting which Hytner chose for his post-Iraq version of Henry V (also with Adrian Lester) nearly a decade ago.

Often I complain about over-elaborate sets which cramp the actors, but here the concept Hytner and his designer Vicki Mortimer use is so precisely thought out that there's no conflict possible.  From the opening of the second act, the action takes place in a forward military base, protected by high walls and concrete blast barriers. Life is lived in the demeaning, cramped surroundings of a containerised, prefabricated zoo.  It's Camp Bastion, a military zone where the normal rules of civilian life don't apply.  Into this prison world Othello brings his new bride Desdemona, brilliantly played by newcomer Olivia Vinall.  Desdemona, a ditzy blonde teenager married to a much older man whom she hardly knows,  is completely out of her comfort zone.  She's not the only woman on stage -- there are, as in Camp Bastion, quite a few women soldiers in uniform, but she stands out in her light cotton shirt, slacks and canvas sneakers.  She's an interloper, just like the hapless Rodrigo, who is also in civilian clothes.  There's a wonderful moment when she joins in a football kickabout with a group of bored soldiers, who politely allow her to dribble the ball past them and score a goal.

Othello's transgressive flaw in this production is not to be black, or a former slave.  He's an insider, not an outsider, but he makes a fatal mistake by insisting on bringing his new bride with him to the front line, where clearly she doesn't belong.  When he first appears in Cyprus, striding on stage after the rout of the Turkish fleet, all the soldiers spring to attention and salute, but Othello ignores them as he makes a beeline for Desdemona.  The assembled soldiery look at their boots in embarrassment, and one senses that Othello is oblivious to the way he has undermined his own authority.

One of the key scenes between Othello and Iago is played out in a prefabricated washroom, a dead zone of military plumbing without any windows on the outside world.  The fight scene where the drunken Cassion goes berserk is also framed in a featureless container, decorated with swimsuited pinups and crates of Turkish beer.  The bedroom where Desdemona dies is even more blank and characterless, emphasising her isolation.  The Olivier stage has lots of wide open spaces, but Mortimer's set deliberately confines most of the action to a succession of narrow claustrophobic boxes, which concentrate and focus the action in riveting fashion.  When the characters briefly escape from the boxes into the open air, as Desdemona and Emilia do for the Willow Song scene, it only accentuates the prison-like confinement of their lives.

Despite these challenging design choices, every moment and every line is clearly visible and audible from the back of the circle.  The Olivier, because of its size, can be a fairly dead space for an audience.  It's far easier to create tension and intimacy in a small space like the Donmar, where Chiwetel Ejiofor won an Olivier award for his Othello, or the Cottesloe, where Simon Russell Beale was a terrific Iago some years ago.  Hytner's skill at using this giant stage and auditorium to best advantage in modern-dress versions of classic plays is quite extraordinary.  I have seldom spent such an exciting evening in the theatre, and the standing ovation at the end was totally deserved.

If Othello had followed up his murder of Desdemona by breaking the fourth wall, jumping from the stage and strangling the two audience members whose mobile phones went off in the final deathbed scene, my evening would have been absolutely perfect.