Othello

It's not a film so it doesn't get on the film review blog. But it's not a week-post, so it doesn't get that "week beginning..." heading. It is unique. How exciting!

As Andy was telling us to blog about our artistic and cultural lives, I thought I'd post my thought on the Citizens Theatre production of Othello which I was ushering last night.

Shakespeare is obsolete. The language is obscure to the point of incomprehensibility, the attitudes the characters display are quintessentially Elizabethan and the humour goes entirely over the audience's head. In particular the racism and sexism demonstrated throughout the play (not by just some characters, but by all) made me think that unless Shakespeare had acheived some sort of mythical status in our country's heritage, such a script would never be permitted to be performed without protestors besieging the building.

Othello is a black man. He is therefore derided by everyone else, who is white. Possibly worse, he himself laments his base nature as an "Indian". When the characters praise him, they say he is almost behaving like a white man; when he does something wrong, they abuse his ckin colour, his parentage, his place of birth, anything except the obvious: his lack of moral judgement.

Iago's wife is an independant thinker. So he abuses her constantly for talking in the street, for speaking her own mind and for not obeying him in everything. There is a minor fluster when Othello hits his wife in public, but it's quickly passed over. Equally when Iago stabs his wife publicly, and she is bleeding to death in a corner of the stage, nobody pays her the slightest heed. They do send a constable after the fleeing Iago, but they don't care tuppence for the dying woman.

So why do people still revere Shakespeare? A great playwright in his day, no doubt. A bard who understood some of the great issues of human nature - true. But also a man strongly rooted in the prejudices, the values and the language of his own day. His stories have dated almost as quickly as his language. If they were being retold today, they woud have to be stripped down to their essential story and built up again from scratch, with new characters, settings, themes, values and plot twists.

As a piece of theatre, I would say this production was average, helped on its way by an intriguing set design and a very strong performance from Andy Clark as Iago.