The story is a familiar one: a father cannot approve of his daughter\u2019s elopement with a powerful and ambitious military leader, who, despite his respectability and his service to the powers that be, remains a social outcast due to his race. One of this leader\u2019s trusted advisors, who feels that he has been passed over for a promotion, slowly poisons his superior\u2019s mind, finally managing to convince him that his wife has been unfaithful with another of his favored advisors. Despite the woman\u2019s valiant efforts to defend herself and her reputation, the story ends in tragedy for all involved. Shakespeare\u2019s Othello plays on the familiar themes of ambition, jealousy, and racial intolerance to create a tragedy that builds to its inevitable crescendo through Iago\u2019s masterful and unfeeling manipulation and Othello\u2019s unfortunate susceptibility to manipulation.<\/p>\n
Othello was staged\u2014or rather, screened\u2014as part of the British National Theatre\u2019s series of performances recorded live in London and presented in one-night-only screenings at cinemas throughout Europe. If you can\u2019t make it to London, this may be the next best thing.<\/p>\n
Director Nicholas Hytner\u2019s adaptation of Othello does not so much \u201cupdate\u201d a classic by adding modern elements as it does reveal the lasting relevance of the play itself. Shakespeare\u2019s original lines seem oddly appropriate to the production\u2019s contemporary settings: the corporate boardroom, the modular buildings of a military base somewhere in the Middle East. Rory Kinnear\u2019s Iago is chillingly self-satisfied while Adrian Lester\u2019s Othello is frustratingly willing to be misled. Olivia Vinall is powerful as Desdemona, and Lyndsey Marshal\u2019s Emilia lends great dramatic energy to the latter half of the play. The scene in which Lester\u2019s Othello succeeds in strangling Vinall\u2019s Desdemona is so stark and wrenchingly visceral that it is difficult to watch.<\/p>\n
If anything, this production gets a bit carried away in furnishing contemporary details. (For instance, why is someone drinking something in nearly every scene\u2014a cup of Starbucks coffee, as well as numerous plastic bottles of water, and several cans of Heineken? Such details almost become part of the play\u2019s plot themselves.) All in all, though, this was a powerful production of Othello, and a rare opportunity to catch Shakespeare \u201clive\u201d in Turku. Click here for further info on National Theatre Live at Finnkino<\/a>. Next shows: Macbeth Nov 18, Hamlet Dec 2.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The story is a familiar one: a father cannot approve of his daughter\u2019s elopement with a powerful and ambitious military leader, who, despite his respectability and his service to the powers that be, remains a social outcast due to his … Continue reading
\nJustin Parks<\/em><\/p>\n