Kathryn Hunter's revival for the RSC puts me in mind of two things. The first is that old potboiler, Gaslight, where a husband tries to persuade his wife that she is going mad. Only here the husband is Iago, dropping poison into Othello's head until the light there begins to flicker and then is put out forever. The other is of those real-life stories of men, husbands and fathers, who lose the plot and are so are bound up in some skewed, misplaced idea of honour that they kill the very thing they love. Patrice Naiambana's general is like that, a lion of a man reduced to putting on gloves and creeping like a thief in the night to slaughter his own wife.
When we first glimpse Othello and Desdemona together on Venice's Bridge of Sighs, they are making sweet music together. But this is the 1950s, and as Desdemona's father, Brabantio, makes very clear, you don't want your daughter marrying a black man. Racism is an everyday fact of life. Othello's soldiers admire him as a successful fighting machine, but when he and his wife retire to bed, a blacked-up crooner in the mess room makes lewd suggestions with a crude, life-size doll, and there are more golliwogs than in a BBC green room.
No wonder Othello goes mad; he is already living a double life in which his standing as a general and standing as a man are quite at odds with each other. It makes him easy prey for Michael Gould's Iago, a man who has already honed his skills as a psychological bully at home, driving his wife Emilia to the bottle, and who now sets out to destroy Othello with a sardonic, matter-of-fact glee. Others around him make it easy: Marcello Magni's Roderigo is a complete buffoon; Alex Hassell's Cassio a good-natured, stupid slab of beef.
Hunter's promising production is full of such psychological acuity, but it takes its time and then it takes some more. Liz Cooke's bridge-like design is clever but sometimes more a hindrance than a help, and scenes depicting Othello's madness and Desdemona's dream – though both visually stunning – are flourishes that detract from the drive towards tragedy. Gould is a frighteningly plausible Iago, a little runtish man taking his revenge on the world and loving every minute of it, and Natalia Tena's Desdemona is like a socially inept Grace Kelly. As the outsider hero, Naiambana is initially too sonorous, but the performance rises in stature the further Othello falls.
