Othello starring John Douglas Thompson at the RSC – review

Much of what follows is purely a matter of taste. There will doubtless be those who find Tim Carroll’s new production of Othello for the RSC to be sumptuous, layered, emotional and powerful. I’m afraid I am not among them.

The problems are legion – and I’m not even talking about the content of the play. Let’s leave aside the abuse, racism, violence against women and other awkwardness, which the production highlights but deliberately chooses not to offer any reflection on. Instead, let’s consider it within its own terms, as an other-worldly, out-of-time interpretation of Shakespeare’s tale of jealousy and tragedy.

Even within those terms, it doesn’t really work. Designer Judith Bowden makes a point of opening up the cavernous space of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre’s thrust stage, framing it with a square of light in the floor and another suspended above, and removing all traces of furnishings, set and props. Beyond the proscenium arch looms a murky nether area, draped with chain-mail beaded curtains and leading, or so it seems, to some kind of brutalist car park. There might be a subliminal message here; there might not.

But then she costumes everyone in authentic Jacobean ruffs, doublets and capes, covering the actors in exactly the kind of flummery she so studiously avoids in the set dressing. It’s a weird inconsistency that is carried through to other parts of the production.

James Oxley’s music is a strange hybrid of Eastern European Gregorian chant and English folk song which is rather haunting in itself but seems to serve no actual purpose in the play. Paule Constable’s lighting, similarly, lurches from the atmospheric to the non-existent as Carroll makes the decision to have Othello murder Desdemona in complete darkness, the crime only audible in extended, graphic unpleasantness.

Stylistically, it’s all over the place. While emphasis is put – thank goodness – on the iambic pentameter of Shakespeare’s text, much of the delivery is declamatory and stilted in a surprisingly old-fashioned manner, with John Douglas Thompson’s title character, unfortunately, one of the chief culprits. Will Keen’s fidgety Iago, by contrast, is thoroughly modern in his psychological approach to the role, using physical tics and facial expressions in a way that feels totally out of keeping with the rest of the company.

And then there are the deaths. Act five’s big fight scene is played with the characters standing in their own spotlights, speaking out front, and no actual interaction whatsoever. The murdered Desdemona (Juliet Rylance), her maid Emilia (Anastasia Hille) and eventually Othello himself end up standing together in a square cordoned off by chain mail, lit from above, in an effort to show them as existing in some different state of being from everyone else. But instead of creating a moving and dramatic effect, the device merely comes off as a directorial gimmick, leaving the actors embarrassingly stranded while one final chorus of plainsong winds things up.

And therein lies the biggest problem – for me, at least. This is a director’s production: the author, the cast and even the audience come a rather distant second.