In Stratford-upon-Avon last April the balance was not right. Michael Attenborough's neo-Edwardian production of Othello was too much dominated by Richard McCabe's grimly jocular Iago. But now Ray Fearon's Moor has come into his own and the result is a thrilling contest of equal forces rather than a lopsided bullfight.
Admittedly, Fearon, in his early 30s, is too young to be a perfect Othello. It is significant that he cuts the line about being "declined into the vale of years", and when Iago says of Desdemona that "she must change for youth", you wonder if he suffers from myopia more than motiveless malignity. But what Fearon brings to the party is a sense of Othello's heroic self-regard and, even more crucially, an awareness of the role's flowing musicality.
At Stratford he often chopped the verse into segments: now he savours the rhetoric so that Othello's iteration of "Farewell" makes its repetitive point and a line like "Wash me in steepdown gulfs of liquid fire" acquires a pictorial immediacy.
What also emerges more strongly than before is that a Iago is not possible without an Othello: in other words, that evil can only flourish in a climate of credulity. It helps that in Attenborough's production, the two men are seen as blood brothers: both products of the same rigid, unbending military ethos that finds its crudest expression in the homoerotic nocturnal revels and drinking bouts in Cyprus.
And McCabe's excellent Iago is defined entirely by his profession. He is the eternal soldier: poker-backed, pigeon-chested and with the instinctive misogyny that comes from a lifetime spent in a military environment. He is the man gnawed by his own lack of preferment and by an envy of a "daily beauty" in the lives of others. As so often, updating Othello and anchoring it in a vividly realised military world explains Iago's actions.
It also gives focus and definition to the female characters who are inevitably outsiders in this macho world. Zoe Waites's Desdemona here shows spirit, ardour, courage and an awareness of her strong sexual power over Othello; but the moment you see her in garden-party dress in the Cypriot garrison you feel that she is somehow doomed and unable to compete with her husband's masculine loyalties. Likewise, Rachel Joyce touchingly turns Emilia into the discarded regimental wife attached to a strutting, impotent husband and destined forever to be a camp follower.
There may have been grander, more operatic Othellos. But, like Trevor Nunn and Sam Mendes before him, Attenborough shows that this is a play that gains enormously from social particularity and from being seen as a battle of equals rather than a showcase for an individual temperament.
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