Who exactly is in charge here?
Is it the strutting general or his self-effacing ensign? The man celebrated for his “free and open nature” or the sociopath who keeps stockpiling secrets?
That question has been occupying the minds of theatergoers and readers since Shakespeare’s “Othello” was first performed in London in the early 17th century. And it is doubtless being puzzled over by audiences at the star-charged Broadway revival of this tragedy of homicidal jealousy, with Denzel Washington in the title role of the noble Moorish warrior and Jake Gyllenhaal as Iago, his eminently credible, equally duplicitous aide-de-camp.
On the most basic level, the answer is obvious. (For those unfamiliar with “Othello,” serious spoilers follow.) It’s the resentment-riddled Iago, the ultimate disgruntled employee, who takes command of his commander, and pretty much everyone in his orbit, in coldblooded pursuit of revenge. It’s Iago who gives the orders to his boss, while making his boss believe otherwise. And it’s Iago who’s still alive at the end.
But in another sense, the contest has never been that easy to call. Put it this way: After you’ve seen it, who is it who dominates your thoughts? Which character’s point of view wound up ruling the night? In other words, who owned the production?
Othello may have the glamour, the grand poetic speeches and a death scene for the ages. But there is a reason that Laurence Olivier, who would play the part blackface to divisive effect in the early 1960s, would worry about having “the stage stolen from me by some young and brilliant Iago.”
“Othello” is Shakespeare’s only major work in which the hero and antihero are given equal weight. (If you keep score by monologues, Iago has eight of them; Othello only three.) And as the Shakespeare scholar Harold Bloom summed up the dichotomy: It is Othello’s tragedy, but it is Iago’s play.
There is another way, of course, in which “Othello” is singular in Shakespeare. Its leading man is Black, and for centuries he was almost always portrayed by white men with dark makeup. And it is as impossible now to see “Othello” without thinking of racism as it is to revisit “The Merchant of Venice” without thinking of antisemitism.
It was Paul Robeson — the titanic actor, singer and political activist — who cracked open the door for the many Black Othellos who have followed, though white classic theater stars (including Anthony Hopkins and Michael Gambon) would continue to take on the role. Robeson’s debuts in London in 1930 and on Broadway in 1943 were watersheds, by any measure, and wildly acclaimed.
“A tragedy of racial conflict” was how Robeson described “Othello,” who said, around the time of the London run in 1930, that he was “killing two birds with one stone” in performing the part: “I’m acting and I’m talking for the Negroes in the way only Shakespeare can.”
Yet reflecting on his own portrayal of Othello some 50 years later, Willard White (the renowned opera singer) said, “One thing you have to remember is that he’s not a jealous Black man, he’s a jealous man.” He added: “Of course the issues in the play are partly racial, but for me they’re not the defining factor.”
It is far more than race, in fact, that defines Othello’s otherness. He inhabits an empyrean realm where emotions are absolute and belief unconditional. Small wonder he’s easy prey for someone as completely worldly as Iago. The fatal clash between the two men is that of two irreconcilable approaches to life.
In the ideal “Othello,” each of these warring worldviews seems to feed the fire of its opposite. Then a magnificent conflagration ensues. As the following list attests, such perfect chemical balances occur only rarely.
London, 1930
Paul Robeson and Maurice Browne
By all accounts, Robeson’s opening night at the Savoy Theater was one of those extraordinary evenings when an audience felt it had witnessed history in the making, and it ended in 20 curtain calls. “Old playgoers searching their memories can recall no such scene in a London theater in many years,” G.W. Bishop wrote in The New York Times. This was, after all, the first Black actor to appear on a mainstream London stage as Othello in nearly a century, when another American, Ira Aldridge, briefly took over from an ailing Edmund Kean. Never mind that, as Iago, Browne (also the play’s producer) registered as “some incommensurate gnat,” according to the fabled critic James Agate. The booming-voiced Robeson brought out the deepest purple in many reviewers’ prose. The Observer’s Ivor Brown described him as “a superb giant of the woods for the great hurricane of tragedy to whisper through, then rage upon, then break.”
Broadway, 1943
Paul Robeson and José Ferrer
It took 13 years for Robeson’s singular, boundary-shattering brand of Shakespearean lightning to strike in Manhattan. But this production, astutely directed by Margaret Webster, was a more unconditional triumph. It helped that Ferrer’s Iago was, as Lewis Nichols put it in The Times, “a half dancing, half strutting Mephistopheles.” (Desdemona was, if you please, Uta Hagen, Ferrer’s wife, who became Robeson’s lover.) At a time when anti-miscegenation laws were still on the books in the States, there were worries that the interracial love affair might alienate audiences. But the opening-night ovations were again thunderous, and reviews were largely ecstatic. (The Herald Tribune described it as a “tribute to the art that transcends racial boundaries.”) The production broke records for a Shakespeare play on Broadway, clocking 296 performances.
London, 1964
Laurence Olivier and Frank Finlay
Those who saw Olivier’s Calypso-cadenced Moor onstage swear he was mesmerizing. His “power, passion and verisimilitude,” wrote the critic in The Sunday Times of London, “will be spoken of with wonder for a long time to come.” (Finlay’s Iago, on the other hand, was dismissed in The New York Times as “mercurial at best and trivial at worst.”) But captured on film the next year, Olivier’s blackface makeup and exaggerated mannerisms registered as grotesque and, to many, deeply offensive. A university professor recently discovered it was not a film to show latter-day students.
Broadway, 1982
James Earl Jones and Christopher Plummer
Jones’s imposing presence and resonant baritone made him a natural for the Moor, whom he first portrayed for the New York Shakespeare Festival when he was 23 in 1964. On Broadway, 18 years later, the Times’s Frank Rich observed of Jones that the “ease and authority as a military commander seem his by birthright, even as he maintains the uneasy aloofness of an outsider.” But it was Plummer who really wowed Rich, who wrote that this Iago “gives us peeks into a nihilistic void of a soul — a mysterious, inexplicable blackness that is horrifying precisely because it cannot be explained away.”
Stratford-upon-Avon, England, 1989
Willard White and Ian McKellen
An opera star of mighty voice and physique, White proved a stately (and mellifluous) Othello. But it was McKellen’s take on Iago — as a salt-of-the-earth, pipe-smoking old soldier in a 19th-century uniform — who haunted the imagination with his unblinking matter-of-factness. Trevor Nunn’s interpretation for the Royal Shakespeare Company, in a 100-seat theater, brought out the play’s emotional claustrophobia and — more important for future productions — the sense of characters shaped and confined by a military ethos.
Washington, D.C., 1997
Patrick Stewart and Ron Canada
In this racially reversed production by the British director Jude Kelly, Stewart’s “vigorous, sinewy” Othello was the only white character onstage. The approach, Peter Marks wrote in The Times, “does not tilt the play toward ham-handed irony; rather, it tends to take the racial issue off the table.” While Stewart, Marks said, was “devastatingly human,” Canada’s Iago was “dishearteningly wooden.”
Brooklyn, 1998
David Harewood and Simon Russell Beale
Sam Mendes’s “spellbinding,” Fascist-era production from the Royal National Theater was built around the conceit that Iago would be virtually invisible to everyone around him. Beale’s chillingly summoned air of soldiery servitude and efficiency, I wrote in the Times, disguised the inner “festering have-not, tired of being passed over.” Harewood’s “strapping, handsome” Moor was ultimately “too overwrought and unvaried” to hold his own against this stealth saboteur.
Off Broadway, 2001
Keith David and Liev Schreiber
In Doug Hughes’s production at the Public Theater, all the world was Iago’s stage and all the play’s other characters merely puppets. Schreiber’s truly terrifying Iago, my review noted, was “a Mephistopheles who was born, as he sees it, not just to rebel against God but to usurp his function.” You could often find “him in an aisle of the theater, looking on like the archetypal nervous director.” Never had it been clearer that Othello — portrayed by David in the style of “a self-involved businessman” — was following his ensign’s script.
In his review for The Times, Matt Wolf described McGregor’s Iago as “oddly blank.” But with the “richly spoken” Ejiofor in the lead, the production “restores pride of place to the play’s fiercely tender, then rabidly jealous title character.” The London Observer’s Susannah Clapp wrote, “He is the best Othello I’ve ever seen: the best for generations.”
Lenox, Mass., 2008
John Douglas Thompson and Michael Hammond
A genuinely majestic Thompson established himself as one of America’s leading Shakespeareans with his Othello, a role he later played Off Broadway. His mellifluous speech and kingly bearing seemed, my review said, “to create a cosmic divide between” the play’s “hero and those around him,” especially Hammond’s weary functionary of an Iago. What separated Othello here was less his race than “his greatness, the blessing and curse of feeling things too greatly and acting proportionately.”
Off Broadway, 2009
John Ortiz and Philip Seymour Hoffman
From the internationally acclaimed experimentalist Peter Sellars, this high-tech production presented its characters as ordinary Americans locked in a domestic tragedy. “The mighty, exotic general Othello and his diabolical flunky Iago have been stripped of their singularity, whether of greatness of spirit or capacity for evil.” Even the brilliant Hoffman fizzled. His Iago, my review said, was someone for whom “revenge is a dish best served hot, like a Big Mac picked up on the fly.”
London, 2013
Adrian Lester and Rory Kinnear
Nicholas Hytner’s contemporary production made “killing use of the pressures and protocol of military life abroad to explain how the play’s homicides could happen.” Turning his uniform into camouflage for every occasion, Kinnear was the most disturbingly convincing liar of any Iago I have seen. Though played with bone-deep conviction by Lester — who also memorably portrayed Aldridge, the first Black Othello on London stages, in the historic play “Red Velvet”— this Othello never stood a chance.
Off Broadway, 2016
David Oyelowo and Daniel Craig
The most perfectly matched pair of moral combatants I have ever encountered in an “Othello.” It was clear from the get-go that each carried his own doom within himself. Sam Gold’s scorching version, set largely in the barracks of “a no-exit theater of war,” presented “the intimate spectacle of two disastrously different, equally great minds in collision.” With its stars “at the top of their game, in a marriage made in both heaven and hell, the story of Othello and Iago could not possibly end otherwise than it does.
“And, O the pity of it!” I wrote. This may by the only “Othello” at which I fully experienced that wrenching, breathless release we call catharsis.