Amazing news at the National. Nicholas Hytner has invented a time machine that can bring Shakespeare to bumpkins who’ve never bothered to read him. His up-to-date Othello begins with Venice’s powerful élite dressed in two-piece suits, like Manchester Utd on tour, and striding around a war-room plotting military action against ‘the Turk’. In Act II, Othello and his task force are choppered out to Cyprus where a heavily fortified compound is ready and waiting for them. Crikey. Looks as though they conquered the enemy and built Camp Bastion in 24 hours flat. Fast work, chaps.
Othello’s squadron boasts two strange new recruits. Iago’s wife, Emilia, wears full British army uniform which, according to this show, is the correct costume for a Venetian aristocrat’s lady’s maid. Desdemona meanwhile sports a fusion of styles. Her flak jacket and helmet indicate membership of a British infantry regiment while her turquoise rucksack hints at a UN role, possibly as Breast Cancer Awareness Ambassador, like Geri Halliwell. Monstrosities pile up on all sides. Because modern soldiery is sabre-free, Othello’s tremendous line — ‘Keep up your bright swords for the dew will rust them’ — is translated into wet-fish Homeric pastiche: ‘Hold your hands’. The scene where Othello misconstrues Cassio’s comments about Bianca as sexual ribaldries about Desdemona is performed in an army toilet. Othello has to deliver piteous, heart-rending lines while popping up and down from behind a cubicle. The immortal last scene is played out in a squaddie’s bedsit with Ikea wardrobes and a second-hand bed flung in one corner. It might have been resting on bricks. I couldn’t quite see.
Stuck in the wrong century, the show has to disregard Shakespeare’s delicate and exquisitely balanced use of social history. In the outer plot, Christian Venice hires a Muslim war hero to defeat a Muslim army.
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