Othello

National Theatre

Why does the devil have the best tunes? Giles Terera (Othello) and Rosy, McEwen (Desdemona) project a perfect lovers’ tension on stage, but this production belongs to the imperfect - Iago and Emilia.

At the start of this exceptional Clint Dyer production, Paul Hilton’s Iago, devilishly seduces the National Theatre audience in a perfect study of the “aesthete of evil”.
For most of the early part of the play, we are rooting for Hilton’s villainy just as we root for the Scottish king and the hunchbacked tyrant in their final scenes.
But whilst Shakespeare gives his eponymous heroes Macbeth and Richard III self-confessed motives, in Iago he gives us a villain without motive. Paul Hilton uses his expressive face like a satanic shaman, sporting a fascistic moustache that we half hope him to twirl as if wallowing in his “motiveless malignity.”

Iago’s theatrical appeal is part of what Rory Kinnear called part “the horrendous joy of the play”. Hilton’s Iago surfs the language and channels the poetry to break through historic carapace of past productions that Dyer gives us as prologue – black-faced Olivier, Ira Aldrige, stage photos, playbills and paintings stretching back to the crack of theatrical doom.

Hilton’s Iago echoes 19 th century melodramatic conventions that Ira Aldridge himself would have recognised. As Rory Kinnear said of his own Iago in the
NT’s 2013 production which was set in a dusty British army base in Cyprus, “In the first half Iago is the engine of the play, but it gets to a point where helps no
longer the puppeteer”.

From that moment the strength and tension of this production moves to Emilia. Although traditionally reduced to a mere adjunct, a maid for Desdemona to address, or a mechanical human theatrical device needed to push the handkerchief business, in the Clint Dyer production Tanya Franks is raised to tragedy – braver in her final defiance than Desdemona – it is as if Charmian not Cleopatra emerges as hero of the final scenes in the Roman play.

Tanya Franks’ study of Emilia is complex - flawed, abused yet finally incredibly brave. Like the thief on the cross, her past flaws are washed away and Franks’Emilia is both instantly contemporary and archetypal. Despite
centuries of spoilers, referenced in the prologue, we suspend disbelief, hoping she will not be killed by her murderous husband. Unlike her mistress. Emilia is
never in “love with easeful death” and this makes her final bravery the greaterand she becomes the hero Dyer’s production.