In a week when a new Romeo and Juliet opens in New York with the words, ‘How y’all doin’?’, it is perhaps worth reminding ourselves that there is still room for an old-fashioned, doublet ‘n’ hose Shakespeare production.
But this isn’t it.
Tim Carroll’s stately, static, but ultimately stumbling, production looks at first sight like a throwback to the theatre of Gielgud and Wolfit, with an open-plan, expressionist set, statuesque blocking, and knee-length breeches that look like they’ve been inflated with a bicycle pump. However, this production is anything but traditional. It’s peppered with ideas that could be seen by some as excitingly experimental, and by others as embarrassingly ill-conceived. Squashing the entire cast into a rectangular block of bodies while they recite a Latin chant is a confrontational opening, but it seems to go nowhere. Staging sword-fights by having characters stand stock-still, on opposite sides of the stage, not looking at each other, while poking their swords in slow motion, is certainly unusual, but there’s a reason it’s not normally done like that: it looks ridiculous. And having Othello kill Desdemona in a total blackout is taking his line ‘Put out the light’ a step too far. Othello and Desdemona, scuffling and grunting in the dark, sound like King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table constructing the giant wooden rabbit in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. When the audience is tittering during this most tragic of all Shakespeare’s murders of the innocent, you know there must be something wrong.
It’s clear what Carroll is trying to do. He wants to get away from modish, modern interpretations, where a director picks an approach off the shelf almost like someone choosing their outfit for a party (‘Hmm, I think I’ll set it in… the First World War!’). By consciously removing any arbitrary ‘angle’, he is trying to leave the stage clear, literally, for the play to speak for itself. Purists who deride the tricksiness of many contemporary Shakespeare interpretations may initially feel excited about this style, with its sparse, puritanical poise. But Carroll has left his actors in a vacuum. Rather than allowing the play to speak, he has left it without a mouth.
Many of the lines are delivered, deliberately, with no intonation or character of any kind. Brabantio, in the very first scene, on being told that his daughter is being ‘tupped’ by an ‘old black ram’ replies ‘What have you lost your wits’ more like HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey than a horrified father. Iago (Will Keen, clearly struggling against the bonds this production has placed around him) speaks many of his lines as if they’re items on a shopping list that he can’t wait to get to the end of, rather than what they are: subtle, poetic examples of supreme, human manipulation. In a production as nakedly exposed as this, you might expect the verse-speaking to come to the fore. Tim Carroll, after all, is a Shakespeare expert. In 2015 he gave a conference speech in which he claimed that he is known at the RSC as the ‘iambic fundamentalist’. And yet this Othello treats the iambic pentameter, the heartbeat of the English language, with utter disdain. Characters either plod through their lines with as much intonation as a stylophone, or they bunch the words up and throw them out like builders shovelling sand off the back of a lorry. The effect is that, even for those who know the play well, many of the speeches become incomprehensible.
What’s most astonishing about all this is that it is intentional. Carroll is vastly experienced, and he’s not a fool. But it feels as though, in his determination to get back to a basic structure, he’s stripped out some of the key elements of the building. It’s like an architect proudly showing you his latest house, and finding there’s no staircase.
To be fair, once the tragically farcical plot of Othello starts to take hold in the second half, this show still manages to draw the audience in at times. The handkerchief that passes from hand to hand like a deathly virus is a masterstroke, and it’s always shocking to watch lives and loves destroyed over such a meaningless bit of rag. But this fascination is down more to Shakespeare himself than the production. The love between Othello (John Douglas Thompson) and Desdemona (Juliet Rylance) struggles to express itself across the divide of a massive age gap and the emotionless staging. Likewise, any sense of military structure or leadership is completely absent. Thompson does evince pain and confusion, but compared to, say, Adrian Lester in Nicholas Hytner’s milestone 2013 production, its tame stuff.
Emilia (played by Anastasia Hille) is one of Shakespeare’s most lovable roles. Like Paulina in A Winter’s Tale she is a pugnacious, witty, mature woman who gives as good as she gets. (I like to think of her being played by the same young man in Shakespeare’s company who, in earlier years, had portrayed Beatrice.) And Hille is a properly lovable Emilia. But – and this is particularly worrying – she is incredibly quiet. For the RSC, which employs voice coaches on every production (here James Oxley takes on that job in addition to composing and music directing), that is unforgivable. Why was it not picked up and addressed? We can only guess, but my concern is that, in combination with a production that steps so uncompromisingly and single-mindedly into such misguided areas, it suggests a kind of dictatorial control at the helm, with cast and creatives nervous to speak up and criticise. If (and only if) that is the case, I would rather see the Royal Shakespeare Company champion young directors willing to be part of a team, than big names who may be coasting on the very thing that Casio bemoans the loss of in Othello: ‘reputation’.
Othello plays at the RSC in