Plays about theatre dominate the Kenneth Branagh Company’s season, which is bookended by Terence Rattigan’s Harlequinade and John Osborne’s The Entertainer. In the midst we get a welcome revival of Lolita Chakrabarti’s Red Velvet, first seen at the Tricycle in 2012, which deals with the black American actor Ira Aldridge. While the play has pertinent things to say about the virus of racial prejudice, it is Adrian Lester’s performance that gives it a sense of grandeur.
The play begins and ends in Lodz, Poland, where the itinerant Aldridge made his final appearance. But the bulk of the action concerns his brief experience as Othello at Covent Garden in 1833 when he stepped in for a dying Edmund Kean; and it is here that Lester is at his blazing best. He shows how Aldridge initially sought to coax his fellow actors into shading their habitual rhetoric with a touch of realism. The high point, however, comes when we see Lester’s Othello in performance. The voice thunders but Lester skilfully uses asides, as in his comment on Desdemona’s “liberal hand”, and repeatedly approaches her with arms outflung as if seeking to conjure up the missing handkerchief by magnetic force. It’s a magnificent piece of acting that makes you almost nostalgic for a vanished gestural style.
I could do without the calculated verbal anachronisms to reinforce the point about the marginalisation of black artists, but Chakrabarti tells the story clearly and Indhu Rubasingham’s production expands to fill the space.
There are telling moments, such as the way an abolitionist casually tosses his coat at a black servant, and good performances from Charlotte Lucas as the spirited Desdemona, Ayesha Antoine as a disregarded helper and Simon Chandler as a hidebound veteran. It is Lester’s fire and fury, however, that brands itself on the mind.
• At the Garrick theatre, London, until 27 February. Buy tickets at the guardianboxoffice.com or call 0330-333 6906.
