Independent on Sunday
by Kate Bassett, 21 November 2004

At last! Cheek by Jowl is up and running again. This high calibre company has virtually been on hold since 1998 when founding director Declan Donnellan and his designer Nick Ormerod headed off to win huge acclaim with Moscow's Maly Drama Theatre and the Bolshoi. Now they are back in the UK, staging Shakespeare's Othello — which they last tackled back in 1982.

Ormerod's set design in simple and spare with the audiences banked on either side of a long dark space that's furnished with five military cargo crates. Darting among these on their way to war committee meetings, the pinstriped governors of Venice appear to be hurrying round a maze of alleys or corridors. Simultaneously, Nonso Anozie's Othello and Caroline Martin's Desdemona come face to face and are transfixed in a pool of light: an immortalised moment of love at first sight an a still point in a hectic world.

Donnellan's brilliant stroke is to keep the key characters on stage whenever they are being spoken of by others. Thus, they visibly haunt their lovers and obsessed enemies. Most poignantly, the sense of imminent loss is heightened as Jonny Phillip's Iago starts besmirching Desdemona's reputation while we see her, standing on one of the gun crates like a makeshift pedestal, still luminously beautiful, as if pictured in her husband's memory. This also makes one think of Hermione's statue in The Winter's Tale (the late romance Donnellan staged with the Maly) even as one knows that, tragically, the marital jealously will be fatal here, with no magical resurrection.

Phillips' Iago is, meanwhile like some decimating Prospero, armed with a swagger stick instead of a wand. When he soliloquises, plotting out his drama of destruction, his victims stand around him impotently suspended in time and — in this ironically defenceless, open plan realm — he has only to conceive of dropping Desdemona's handkerchief into Cassio's hands, then reach over and, hey presto, it is done.

The production has its weak points. There are some reductive textual cuts and Anozie can sound vocally lightweight, skimming over certain richly lyrical lines and visceral curves. Inversely, Phillips slightly overdoes the vibrato and menacing, slow delivery of his speeches, though it does create an intense, dream like atmosphere. His emotional ambiguity is most intriguing, for you are never quite sure if he is acting or actually quivering with regret as he hesitates in his tête-á-têtes with Othello. Moreover, his sudden leap forward with gaping, silent mouth, in reaction to Othello's suicide, might be morbid ecstasy or suppressed love, surfacing too late.

Physically, both the male leads are riveting. Skeletally gaunt and unshaven, Phillips looks like a desert rat (both animal and military) and a viper (spitting as if his mouth tastes poisonous). In contrast, Anozie is a mountain of a man. That's to say, touching when he is a gentle giant with Martin's Desdemona, who stands on tiptoes to kiss him, and horrifying when he strangles her, lifting her above his head with her legs thrashing against his waist. Martin is herself outstanding, still girlish and tragically confident that her husband's love (unlike her father's) is reliable. Jaye Griffith's black Emilia becomes profoundly moving as well, lounging with Desdemona on her bed like a tender big sister, then proving ferociously devoted and dying by her side. All in all, this is an ensemble realising a directorial vision that is full of insights. Well worth catching.