The Australian
by John McCallum, 9 August 2004

When a Good Man is a Fool

This production is a reminder of what all the fuss is about. About Shakespeare. It is direct, clear intense and vivid. It has some superb acting, some extraordinarily expressive staging, created by the movement of the actors and a relentless drive towards that terrible, aching conclusion.

Othello can be infuriating. The awful, drawn out action as we watch Iago's elaborate plot unfold and Othello's monumental foolishness slowly entrap him and Desdemona, can provoke that killer response to all the grandly simple tragedies, "Just get over it!"

But Declan Donnellan's production grabs attention from its terrific opening scene, in which the politicians of Venice, the real villains here, can scarcely tear themselves away from their affairs of state to pay attention to what for them is merely an irrelevant great love.

It plays the series of agonising confrontations of the middle acts an intensity and violence of emotion that carries us through to the stillness of the bedroom scenes that lead to the murder of Desdemona.

These, including a wonderfully intimate almost happy scene of self assertion and release between Caroline Martin's sexy, feisty Desdemona and Jaye Griffith's terrific black and cool Amelia, are a reminder of what Shakespeare certainly knew; that time spent setting it all up is never wasted if you have a great ending.

The momentum of this production carries on into the resolution scene after the murder/suicide. The two characters we care about are dead but we need the explanations.

At the end the politicians take over again and all that messy passion is consigned away in a dispatch back to the centre of their empire, like a brief military report of a moving human story sent from Baghdad back to Washington.

Nonso Anozie is a superb Othello, naïve, wide-eyed, completely unaware of the fear that his bodily power and his back otherness instil in the sleazily sophisticated apparatchiks who creep fearfully around him but who in the end destroy him.

He does the famous, "speak of me as I am", speech with an innocence that is heart rending. As if a slave like him could ever explain himself to these smooth talking imperialist bastards.

Jonny Phillip's Iago is a rat-like villain, but his thirst for revenge is based in real passion and he too is an outsider, excluded from power with a jealously of his own, fearful about his hold over his wife Amelia and therefore violent to her and vicious towards the black devil that he sees, rightly, as her racial ally.

This is great production that reworks a difficult old play in an urgent and modern way.