Shakespeare Bash’ d version is unsettling
At the opening performance of Othello by the indie company Shakespeare Bash’d, I checked my phone at intermission to friends’ messages about Donald Trump’s State of the Union speech, unfolding at the same time.
It’s usually not difficult to find a parallel between current political dealings and the drama of Shakespeare, but the unfortunate resonance between Othel
lo and the current political climate has less to do with backdoor scheming and desperate grasps for power, as in Shakespeare’s more politically driven plays; it’s the xenophobia, sexism, entitlement and impulse for violence within the characters that feels so recognizable. James Wallis, director of this
Othello and co-founder of Shakespeare Bash’d, says in his program note that this is a “terrifying play about otherness,” born out of the main conceit that a Black Muslim general’s status in the Venetian army draws the mortal vengeance of his ensign, Iago, who brings about Othello’s downfall with a plot to make him suspect his wife of infidelity.
Iago has always been the villain of Othello, but rarely one so familiar — put him in a red baseball cap, tiki torch in hand and an r/incel Reddit message board at his fingertips and we have the convergence of today’s social threats.
Therein lies the pro and the con to this production Othello, a play that purports to expose a societal evil with devastating outcomes: brutal onstage murders of two innocent women, one of whom quietly acquiesces, the other portrayed as a hypersexual fool; Othello’s almost immediate succumbing to violence and anger and jealousy; and letting the bad guy live at the end.
With Wallis’s experience assistant directing at the Stratford Festival and a reputable cast of indie Toronto actors — including Stratford’s E.B. Smith as Othello and former Shaw Festival actor Jennifer Dzialoszynski as Iago’s wife, Emilia — this Othello is intimate and inescapable. James Graham as Iago is particularly unnerving, with blue eyes atop a chilling sneer and a preciseness to his speech and diction that informs his calculated plans.
Dzialoszynski is a lifeline as Emilia, filled with energy and intelligence. Her Emilia is constantly watching, increasingly shrewdly, balancing her care and fear for Desdemona (a charming and confident Catherine Rainville) with the pains of her own abusive marriage to Iago.
In fact, it seems she uses her own experience to catch on more quickly to Desdemona’s peril but ultimately doesn’t trust her instincts enough to stop it. Her realization of her husband’s plot, the rage she unleashes as she reveals the truth and the blame she puts upon herself is the play’s moral centre and Dzialoszynski is fearless with it.
Shakespeare Bash’d resists any particular choices of setting or time or adaptation — there’s no apparent desire for the story to be anything but what we’ve known for 400 years — but I felt a deep desire for stronger directorial choices to situate us within a conceptual framework.
When we are faced every day with proof that societal evils exist, is there an obligation to make a bigger statement about what Othello means? To contextualize and investigate? To give us, at least, some kind of trigger warning?
This was one of my more unsettling nights of theatre in some time, which is a testament to the talent involved, but it also felt overwhelming.
That might be exactly what you’re looking for in a Shakespeare production or exactly what you’re not.