Othello most exciting in four decades
Merchant of Venice also shows Stratford’s renewed strengths
The Stratford Festival’s late-season production of Othello is stunning in so many ways that it’s difficult to know where to begin.
The bottom line is that it’s the festival’s most exciting treatment of Shakespeare’s brooding tragedy in more than 40 years. But that’s not the only good news. There’s also a provocative new production of The Merchant of Venice — further evidence that Shakespeare is showing renewed strengths at Stratford following the early-season disappointments of Romeo and Juliet and Measure for Measure.
Othello features a career-advancing performance from Stratford regular Dion Johnstone as the heroic Moorish general who is driven to tragedy and death by the canker of jealousy.
And it is complemented by the sizzling work of Graham Abbey as Iago, the malevolent ensign whose malice dispatches Othello and his beloved Desdemona to their doom.
The production, which arrived last week, also demonstrates director Chris Abraham’s gift for locating the still-sad music of humanity in his material.
The production moves with the velocity of a bullet, bringing remarkable clarity and a powerful dramatic momentum to the action. But as Othello is driven to murder the woman he wrongly believes to be unfaithful, the play becomes more than a horror story.
The death of Desdemona, portrayed in this production with a singular beauty of spirit by Bethany Jillard, is shocking to watch. Yet, these appalling moments are also imbued with a terrible sense of emotional loss and spiritual desolation.
The heartbreak transcends the horror. And Johnstone’s authority over the role is unassailable as he delivers an Othello of valour, volatility and vulnerability.
Abbey’s Iago, a manipulative monster revelling in his own capacity for unleashing mayhem, is seductive in his villainy. There are also solid performances from Mike Shara, a convincing ninny as Iago’s ally Rodrigo; Deborah Hay, persuasive in the tricky role of Iago’s wife, Emilia; and Brad Hodder, appropriately furious as Cassio.
Designer Julie Fox has adorned the sparely furnished Avon stage with a sumptuous show of costumes and has supplied a brilliantly conceived geometric set, full of odd shifts and angles and distorted perspectives, symbols of a moral order in chaos.
Othello is an outsider. So is Shylock, the Jewish moneylender whose presence in The Merchant of Venice continues to swathe the play in controversy.
Director Antoni Cimolino’s absorbing but often disturbing re-enactment reaches its zenith with the play’s riveting trial scene which sees Shylock on the verge of winning the pound of flesh he has demanded as his legal right from the defaulting Antonio.
Cimolino pushes the envelope with his depiction of a clash both of culture and religion as Tom McCamus’s Antonio — stripped to the waist, arms extended in a crude parody of the Crucifixion — awaits the avenging blade of Scott Wentworth’s Shylock.
The last-minute intervention of the wise and witty Portia (Michelle Giroux) who has appeared in court disguised as a lawyer, saves the day and leads to Shylock’s defeat and humiliation.
These moments make for gripping theatre. They are also uncomfortable because of the ambivalent responses they trigger in an audience repeatedly uncertain whom to root for. The production stakes its position early on: Nothing in this world is rendered in black and white.
Wentworth’s carefully modulated portrait of Shylock, whom we have earlier encountered as a toughminded businessman in a beautifully tailored suit, has now disintegrated into a plaintiff clearly unhinged and driven by blood lust.
But earlier, other aspects of this complicated man have asserted themselves: his spiritual and cultural pride; the anguish of losing daughter Jessica and some of his possessions to Lorenzo, a Christian; the festering sense of grievance that repeatedly inflames him against a community that despises him even as it does business with him.
That’s why, notwithstanding the monstrous lengths to which Shylock’s obsessions have taken him, he becomes a pitiful figure as the trial scene ends and as Jonathan Goad’s hateful Gratiano snatches Shylock’s yarmulke off his head during a raucous anti-Semitic outburst and throws it on the floor.
That traditional Jewish headgear re-emerges at the very end in a brilliant piece of theatrical business that cuts short the tiresome frivolities of that final-act coda that sees Antonio, Portia and their pals living it up.
Cimolino’s final flourish does bring back the darkness and with it a reminder that the production is set in fascist Italy in the 1930s on the eve of a war that will make short shrift of a victim such as Shylock.
And yes, this tormented man does emerge here as more victim than villain. Wentworth’s portrayal underscores the essential truth of critic William Hazlitt’s dictum that Shylock is honest in his vices while his enemies are hypocritical in their virtues.
The problem today is that Shylock and the terrible lessons of history now bring so much baggage to the play that its moments of lyric romantic comedy seem almost like intrusions.
Even so, those wonderful comic scenes involving the wooing of the wealthy Portia do disarm us. There’s a hilarious turn from Antoine Yared as the most ridiculous of the three suitors. As for Giroux’s Portia, a creature as enticing in her body language as in her wit, it is sheer delight.
Sara Farb’s portrayal of Shylock’s defecting daughter, Jessica, gives us too much of a cipher; Sophia Walker brings a sparkling intelligence to the role of Portia’s gentlewoman, Nerissa.
And Ron Pederson struggles valiantly with the character of the dreadful Launcelot Gobbo, perhaps the most unfunny clown in the Shakespeare canon. Antonio can be dull in performance, but McCamus manages to find an element of flawed nobility.
Othello continues at the Avon Theatre to Oct. 19, and The Merchant of Venice continues at the Festival Theatre until Oct. 18. For more information, phone 1-800-567-1600 or email stratfordfestival.ca.