\n<\/p>\n
Who exactly is in charge here?<\/p>\n
Is it the strutting general or his self-effacing ensign? The man celebrated for his \u201cfree and open nature\u201d or the sociopath who keeps stockpiling secrets?<\/p>\n
That question has been occupying the minds of theatergoers and readers since Shakespeare\u2019s \u201cOthello\u201d was first performed in London in the early 17th century. And it is doubtless being puzzled over by audiences at the star-charged Broadway revival<\/a> of this tragedy of homicidal jealousy, with Denzel Washington<\/a> in the title role of the noble Moorish warrior and Jake Gyllenhaal as Iago, his eminently credible, equally duplicitous aide-de-camp.<\/p>\n On the most basic level, the answer is obvious. (For those unfamiliar with \u201cOthello,\u201d<\/a> serious spoilers follow.) It\u2019s the resentment-riddled Iago, the ultimate disgruntled employee, who takes command of his commander, and pretty much everyone in his orbit, in coldblooded pursuit of revenge. It\u2019s Iago who gives the orders to his boss, while making his boss believe otherwise. And it\u2019s Iago who\u2019s still alive at the end.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n But in another sense, the contest has never been that easy to call. Put it this way: After you\u2019ve seen it, who is it who dominates your thoughts? Which character\u2019s point of view wound up ruling the night? In other words, who owned <\/em>the production?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Othello may have the glamour, the grand poetic speeches and a death scene for the ages. But there is a reason that Laurence Olivier, who would play the part blackface to divisive effect in the early 1960s, would worry about having \u201cthe stage stolen from me by some young and brilliant Iago.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cOthello\u201d is Shakespeare\u2019s only major work in which the hero and antihero are given equal weight. (If you keep score by monologues, Iago has eight of them; Othello only three.) And as the Shakespeare scholar Harold Bloom summed up the dichotomy: It is Othello\u2019s tragedy, but it is Iago\u2019s play.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n There is another way, of course, in which \u201cOthello\u201d is singular in Shakespeare. Its leading man is Black, and for centuries he was almost always portrayed by white men with dark makeup. And it is as impossible now to see \u201cOthello\u201d without thinking of racism as it is to revisit \u201cThe Merchant of Venice\u201d without thinking of antisemitism.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n It was Paul Robeson \u2014 the titanic actor, singer and political activist \u2014 who cracked open the door for the many Black Othellos who have followed, though white classic theater stars (including Anthony Hopkins and Michael Gambon) would continue to take on the role. Robeson\u2019s debuts in London in 1930 and on Broadway in 1943 were watersheds, by any measure, and wildly acclaimed.<\/p>\n \u201cA tragedy of racial conflict\u201d was how Robeson described \u201cOthello,\u201d who said, around the time of the London run in 1930, that he was \u201ckilling two birds with one stone\u201d in performing the part: \u201cI\u2019m acting and I\u2019m talking for the Negroes in the way only Shakespeare can.\u201d<\/p>\n Yet reflecting on his own portrayal of Othello some 50 years later, Willard White (the renowned opera singer) said, \u201cOne thing you have to remember is that he\u2019s not a jealous Black<\/em> man, he\u2019s a jealous man<\/em>.\u201d He added: \u201cOf course the issues in the play are partly racial, but for me they\u2019re not the defining factor.\u201d<\/p>\n It is far more than race, in fact, that defines Othello\u2019s otherness. He inhabits an empyrean realm where emotions are absolute and belief unconditional. Small wonder he\u2019s easy prey for someone as completely worldly as Iago. The fatal clash between the two men is that of two irreconcilable approaches to life.<\/p>\n In the ideal \u201cOthello,\u201d each of these warring worldviews seems to feed the fire of its opposite. Then a magnificent conflagration ensues. As the following list attests, such perfect chemical balances occur only rarely.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n London, 1930<\/p>\n By all accounts, Robeson\u2019s opening night at the Savoy Theater was one of those extraordinary evenings when an audience felt it had witnessed history in the making, and it ended in 20 curtain calls. \u201cOld playgoers searching their memories can recall no such scene in a London theater in many years,\u201d G.W. Bishop wrote in The New York Times<\/a>. This was, after all, the first Black actor to appear on a mainstream London stage as Othello in nearly a century, when another American, Ira Aldridge, briefly took over from an ailing Edmund Kean. Never mind that, as Iago, Browne (also the play\u2019s producer) registered as \u201csome incommensurate gnat,\u201d according to the fabled critic James Agate. The booming-voiced Robeson brought out the deepest purple in many reviewers\u2019 prose. The Observer\u2019s Ivor Brown described him as \u201ca superb giant of the woods for the great hurricane of tragedy to whisper through, then rage upon, then break.\u201d<\/p>\n Broadway, 1943<\/p>\n It took 13 years for Robeson\u2019s singular, boundary-shattering brand of Shakespearean lightning to strike in Manhattan. But this production, astutely directed by Margaret Webster, was a more unconditional triumph. It helped that Ferrer\u2019s Iago was, as Lewis Nichols put it in The Times, \u201ca half dancing, half strutting Mephistopheles.\u201d (Desdemona was, if you please, Uta Hagen, Ferrer\u2019s wife, who became Robeson\u2019s lover.) At a time when anti-miscegenation laws were still on the books in the States, there were worries that the interracial love affair might alienate audiences. But the opening-night ovations were again thunderous, and reviews were largely ecstatic. (The Herald Tribune described it<\/a> as a \u201ctribute to the art that transcends racial boundaries.\u201d) The production broke records for a Shakespeare play on Broadway, clocking 296 performances.<\/p>\n London, 1964<\/p>\n Those who saw Olivier\u2019s Calypso-cadenced Moor onstage swear he was mesmerizing. His \u201cpower, passion and verisimilitude,\u201d wrote the critic in The Sunday Times of London, \u201cwill be spoken of with wonder for a long time to come.\u201d (Finlay\u2019s Iago, on the other hand, was dismissed in The New York Times as \u201cmercurial at best and trivial at worst.\u201d<\/a>) But captured on film the next year, Olivier\u2019s blackface makeup and exaggerated mannerisms registered as grotesque and, to many, deeply offensive. <\/span>A university professor recently discovered<\/a> it was not a film to show latter-day students.<\/p>\n Broadway, 1982<\/p>\n Jones\u2019s imposing presence and resonant baritone made him a natural for the Moor, whom he first portrayed for the New York Shakespeare Festival when he was 23 in 1964. On Broadway, 18 years later, the Times\u2019s Frank Rich observed<\/a> of Jones that the \u201cease and authority as a military commander seem his by birthright, even as he maintains the uneasy aloofness of an outsider.\u201d But it was Plummer who really wowed Rich, who wrote that this Iago \u201cgives us peeks into a nihilistic void of a soul \u2014 a mysterious, inexplicable blackness that is horrifying precisely because it cannot be explained away.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Stratford-upon-Avon, England, 1989<\/p>\n An opera star of mighty voice and physique, White proved a stately (and mellifluous) Othello<\/a>. But it was McKellen\u2019s take on Iago \u2014 as a salt-of-the-earth, pipe-smoking old soldier in a 19th-century uniform \u2014 who haunted the imagination with his unblinking matter-of-factness. Trevor Nunn\u2019s interpretation for the Royal Shakespeare Company, in a 100-seat theater, brought out the play\u2019s emotional claustrophobia and \u2014 more important for future productions \u2014 the sense of characters shaped and confined by a military ethos.<\/p>\n Washington, D.C., 1997<\/p>\n In this racially reversed production by the British director Jude Kelly, Stewart\u2019s \u201cvigorous, sinewy\u201d Othello was the only white character onstage. The approach, Peter Marks wrote<\/a> in The Times, \u201cdoes not tilt the play toward ham-handed irony; rather, it tends to take the racial issue off the table.\u201d While Stewart, Marks said, was \u201cdevastatingly human,\u201d Canada\u2019s Iago was \u201cdishearteningly wooden.\u201d<\/p>\n Brooklyn, 1998<\/p>\n Sam Mendes\u2019s \u201cspellbinding,\u201d Fascist-era production from the Royal National Theater was built around the conceit that Iago would be virtually invisible to everyone around him. Beale\u2019s chillingly summoned air of soldiery servitude and efficiency, I wrote in the Times<\/a>, disguised the inner \u201cfestering have-not, tired of being passed over.\u201d Harewood\u2019s \u201cstrapping, handsome\u201d Moor was ultimately \u201ctoo overwrought and unvaried\u201d to hold his own against this stealth saboteur.<\/p>\n Off Broadway, 2001<\/p>\n In Doug Hughes\u2019s production at the Public Theater, all the world was Iago\u2019s stage and all the play\u2019s other characters merely puppets. Schreiber\u2019s truly terrifying Iago, my review noted<\/a>, was \u201ca Mephistopheles who was born, as he sees it, not just to rebel against God but to usurp his function.\u201d You could often find \u201chim in an aisle of the theater, looking on like the archetypal nervous director.\u201d Never had it been clearer that Othello \u2014 portrayed by David in the style of \u201ca self-involved businessman\u201d \u2014 was following his ensign\u2019s script.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n In his review for The Times<\/a>, Matt Wolf described McGregor\u2019s Iago as \u201coddly blank.\u201d But with the \u201crichly spoken\u201d Ejiofor in the lead, the production \u201crestores pride of place to the play\u2019s fiercely tender, then rabidly jealous title character.\u201d The London Observer\u2019s Susannah Clapp wrote, \u201cHe is the best Othello I\u2019ve ever seen: the best for generations.\u201d<\/p>\n Lenox, Mass., 2008<\/p>\n A genuinely majestic Thompson established himself as one of America\u2019s leading Shakespeareans with his Othello, a role he later played Off Broadway. His mellifluous speech and kingly bearing seemed, my review said,<\/a> \u201cto create a cosmic divide between\u201d the play\u2019s \u201chero and those around him,\u201d especially Hammond\u2019s weary functionary of an Iago. What separated Othello here was less his race than \u201chis greatness, the blessing and curse of feeling things too greatly and acting proportionately.\u201d<\/p>\n Off Broadway, 2009<\/p>\n From the internationally acclaimed experimentalist Peter Sellars, this high-tech production<\/a> presented its characters as ordinary Americans locked in a domestic tragedy. \u201cThe mighty, exotic general Othello and his diabolical flunky Iago have been stripped of their singularity, whether of greatness of spirit or capacity for evil.\u201d Even the brilliant Hoffman fizzled. His Iago, my review said, was someone for whom \u201crevenge is a dish best served hot, like a Big Mac picked up on the fly.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n London, 2013<\/p>\n Nicholas Hytner\u2019s contemporary production made \u201ckilling use of the pressures and protocol of military life abroad to explain how the play\u2019s homicides could happen.\u201d Turning his uniform into camouflage for every occasion, Kinnear was the most disturbingly convincing liar<\/a> of any Iago I have seen. Though played with bone-deep conviction by Lester \u2014 who also memorably portrayed Aldridge, the first Black Othello on London stages, in the historic play \u201cRed Velvet\u201d<\/a>\u2014 this Othello never stood a chance.<\/p>\n Off Broadway, 2016<\/p>\n The most perfectly matched pair of moral combatants I have ever encountered in an \u201cOthello.\u201d It was clear from the get-go that each carried his own doom within himself. Sam Gold\u2019s scorching version<\/a>, set largely in the barracks of \u201ca no-exit theater of war,\u201d presented \u201cthe intimate spectacle of two disastrously different, equally great minds in collision.\u201d With its stars \u201cat the top of their game, in a marriage made in both heaven and hell, the story of Othello and Iago could not possibly end otherwise than it does.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd, O the pity of it!\u201d I wrote. This may by the only \u201cOthello\u201d at which I fully experienced that wrenching, breathless release we call catharsis.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\nPaul Robeson and Maurice Browne<\/h2>\n
Paul Robeson and Jos\u00e9 Ferrer<\/h2>\n
Laurence Olivier and Frank Finlay<\/h2>\n
James Earl Jones and Christopher Plummer<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Willard White and Ian McKellen<\/h2>\n
Patrick Stewart and Ron Canada<\/h2>\n
David Harewood and Simon Russell Beale<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Keith David and Liev Schreiber<\/h2>\n
John Douglas Thompson and Michael Hammond<\/h2>\n
John Ortiz and Philip Seymour Hoffman<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Adrian Lester and Rory Kinnear<\/h2>\n
David Oyelowo and Daniel Craig<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n