Theatre review: Othello (Theatre Royal Haymarket)

Othello's a part that can be played as quite a young and dynamic soldier who's risen, through skill, quickly through the ranks to become a decorated general. There's also a couple of throwaway lines about him being older than his wife, that have helped foster a different tradition of him being a much older man. So among Shakespearean leading roles it's perhaps the one that's least likely to raise eyebrows when David Harewood revisits, at 59, a part he first played 28 years ago at the National, famously becoming the first black actor to do so there. This time he's in the West End, paired with an equally popular star, Toby Jones, as his Iago. The latter is his long-standing friend and brother in arms, or at least so he thinks; Othello's overlooking him for promotion has brought to the surface long-held resentments, and he now plans to take a convoluted revenge involving the general's new wife.

Desdemona (Caitlin FitzGerald) has been friends since childhood with Cassio (Luke Treadaway,) the soldier who got the promotion Iago wanted. Iago now plots to make it look as if that friendship is an affair, and drive Othello mad with jealousy.

This is a strong cast but they're pretty much left to fend for themselves in Tom Morris' old fashioned, stately and static production. It's not quite as creaky a throwback as last year's RSC effort, but it still feels flat and overly declamatory, and despite everyone being almost permanently in uniform there's little sense of military rank between them, and even less of them spending the first half of the play in the middle of a battle; while those uniforms seem to be a fairly random assortment of combat and formal.

Iago's motivations are famously open to interpretation, and Morris' production seems loath to have an opinion on them; his claims to believe Othello cuckolded him are gone (they rarely make much sense anyway,) the racist language is still there but underplayed, and Jones is so laid-back it's hard to buy him as the career soldier who really cares that much about his advancement. We're left with affable evil without much of the evil, and the feeling that he's only acting as an agent of chaos because he's bored.

Jones does lean strongly on the side of Iago making it up on the fly rather than being a master strategist - there's an air of desperation to him making up stories of Cassio talking in his sleep that brought about audience groans. And that does fit in with Harewood's take on his character: He's spoken about using his own mental health struggles to approach the role, and there's definitely a sense that Othello manages to resist Iago's machinations until the sheer onslaught of them causes a sudden and complete personality shift.

But with two such beloved actors in the leads there is an unfortunate tendency for a sympathetic audience to take everything they say as a joke, and it does further dampen the play's darkness as it tries to build to a tragic ending (I don't think I've ever been more acutely aware of just how many times Shakespeare has another character ironically praise Iago's honesty, here getting an automatic laugh every single time.) At least Tom Byrne as Roderigo is getting laughs from a character who's meant to be a fool, while Vinette Robinson as the sidelined Emilia really gets to steal the show in her final, dramatic scene.

But much like Ti Green's designs, which involve a muddled use of arches, projections and onstage lighting rigs, the show as a whole really refuses to cohere or bring these performances into a theme that makes sense. (Morris also appears to have, for the purposes of the cast list only, renamed two of the characters to have my own first and middle names in Greek, and I just don't know what to make of that.) Jude Owusu's Lodovico being dressed as a priest does make sense of just how excited he gets about the prospect of torturing someone though, fair enough.

Othello by William Shakespeare is booking until the 17th of January at the Theatre Royal Haymarket.

Running time: 2 hours 45 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Brinkhoff/Mögenburg.