This sell-out production by the Royal Shakespeare Company has moved to London, and what a production it is!  Gregory Doran’s staging of Shakespeare’s tragedy in London’s intimate new Trafalgar Studios Theatre creates immediacy and impact.  Antony Sher is electrifying as his Iago is the epitome of racial hatred, a hard-bitten, envious, malicious soldier among whose first words are “I hate the Moor.”  In contrast, Sello Maake ka Ncube’s Othello is a dignified, calm general, whose first utterance, to attackers surrounding him, “Put up your bright swords, for the dew will rust them,” have not only beauty but a  rhythm that marks him as an alien, a black among whites in Venice, a quiet voice of confidence in the confusion.

 Both actors being South Africans, they know racial prejudice at first hand, as Mr. Sher recounts in his autobiography.  This experience he adds to his characterization of Iago, mocking Othello with monkey gestures behind his back or over his prostrate figure.  Directly addressing his soliloquies to the audience, he exposes his evil plot to arose Othello’s jealousy of Cassio (awarded the rank Iago wanted) and thus entrap, as in a web, both men and Othello’s wife, Desdemona.  Mr. Sher also indicates, through delivery and gesture, Iago’s perverted sexual obsessions: as he goes to massage his wife’s shoulders, his fingers take on a life of their own and make as if to strangle her; twice he admits to the audience that he suspects her of committing adultery with Othello.  When he soliloquizes about Desdemona, he tells us “Now I do love her too,” and this he demonstrates when embracing as if to console her, or by fondling her stockings in her open trunk.

As Mr. Mcube’s Othello becomes more and more distraught under Iago’s insinuations about Desdemona’s supposed infidelity, he progressively reverts to his African roots, as did Eugene O’Neill’s Emperor Jones.  In the central scene where Iago first casually  mentions Cassio’s attentiveness to Desdemona and then progresses to making Othello believe she is unfaithful – “naked in bed” with “other proofs” – his anger and vow of revenge take the form of a tribal rite as he stamps, stoops, and twists his body, arms aloft.

Lisa Dillon is a perfect Desdemona – beautiful, blonde, fragile, able to defy her father in the Senate and defend her marriage, but too young and inexperienced to counter Othello’s accusations, and too devastated to fight back when he strikes her and calls her a whore.  Amanda Harris’s excellent portrayal of  Emilia stands in contrast: wiser, yet driven to drink by husband Iago, whom she hopes to please by giving him Desdemona’s handkerchief, with tragic results.  In the final scene, Ms. Harris expertly changes from a cynic to a near-virago, exposing the murder, demanding justice, and haranguing Iago (who stabs her in the crotch).

The setting in Cyprus as a colonial outpost, with its high, metal-link gates topped with barbed wire, and its hard-drinking soldiers suggests a post-World War II period, with the women in calf-length dresses and hairdos of that era.  Necessary properties are carried on, like the bed in the last act, requiring the curtains around it to be “flown” or lowered from above.  This mosquito-net hanging completely surrounds the bed, except for an exit at the back, hampering action in this important scene.  But as the events move swiftly to the “tragic loading” of the bed, the tragic impact is fully realized, with unrepentant Iago kneeling and vowing never to reveal the reason for his behavior – because he does not know it.  Performance schedule: www.rsc.org.uk.

Hamlet

At last a young Hamlet!  Although the text so indicates, by appending the adjective  every time he is addressed as “young Hamlet,” and the plot bears this out, most actors who play the role are no longer young.  Only a teen-ager could be so upset over a mother’s remarriage. That he  returns from university to attend his father’s funeral is Shakespeare’s addition to the Danish legend.  Making him a student also testifies to his age: records of Oxford University in Shakespeare’s day indicate an admission age of thirteen to fifteen. His being young and vulnerable makes the odds against Hamlet seem even greater, and his achievement of his goal even more admirable.

At London’s Old Vic Theatre Trevor Nunn has directed an excellent modern dress production, with two twenty-three-year-old Hamlets who look sixteen.   This dictates that his schoolfellows Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, friend Horatio, Laertes, and Ophelia be the same age, while Gertrude, enacted by Imogen Stubbs, is in her thirties.  And we might reflect on the fact that when Shakespeare wrote “Hamlet” in 1600 or 1601, his own son Hamnet, who died at eleven, would have been fifteen or sixteen, the age of his surviving twin sister Judith.

As impressively played by Al Weaver, his lean, lanky, curly-haired Hamlet is witty, kind, and intelligent, and in turn tense, excitable, sarcastic, moody and nearly hysterical, although never over the top.  He gains and holds our sympathy, even when he is so accusatory in the scene in his mother’s bedchamber, being “cruel only to be kind.”  Ms. Stubbs is excellent as Gertrude, going from empty-headed enjoyment of her celebrity status as queen to grief when Hamlet confronts her with his disgust at the sexual implications of her marriage to Claudius, her character deepening after the deaths of Polonius and Ophelia, with a moving account of the drowning.  She and Claudius (Tom Mannion) make no secret of the physicality of their attraction to each other.

Mr. Nunn has imaginatively created a production that is clear, fast-moving, and well-spoken, while modern dress contributes contemporary relevance.  He has judiciously but sparingly cut the text and shifted a couple of scenes.  He also solves a “crux” that has worried scholars. When “Yorick’s skull, the king’s jester” is dug up, the gravedigger  claims he’s been there since “young Hamlet was born” and later adds that he has been sexton “thirty years.”  In the current production the time is amended to “a dozen” years, because Hamlet remembers that Yorick had borne him as a youngster “on his back a thousand times.”  Most likely Mr. Nunn is just following an earlier emendation to make the years conform to Richard Burbage, the star of Shakespeare’s company, and middle- aged when he first played the role. (Old Vic Theatre, Waterloo Road, London SE1 8NB.  Phone: 0870 060 6628 www.seehamlet.com. )

Measure for Measure

The virtues of this inventive modern dress production at the National Theatre are its clarity and the performances of its three principals – Paul Rhys as Angelo, Naomi Frederick as Isabella, and David Troughton as the Duke.   It is directed by Simon McBurney, who also directs Complicite, the co-producer.  Solving most of the problems presented by this difficult “problem” play, Mr. McBurney gives it contemporary relevance.  Multiple tv monitors suggest constant surveillance by the state, where the stern deputy ruler Angelo is determined to cure the “corruption” the departing Duke of Vienna has seen “boil and bubble.”  But the too-lenient Duke has his reservations about the cold Angelo, “whose very blood is snow broth.”  Assuming the disguise of a friar, the Duke will “see if power change purpose, what our seemers be.”  Those words set the dual theme of the play: power and testing.  Given the power, how will the seeming virtuous Angelo use it?

We see immediately that with his newly-acquired power, Angelo is going to extremes: cctv is everywhere, and an old law against fornication is invoked against gentleman Claudio, the evidence being the pregnancy of Juliet, whom he has not yet married.  Death is decreed as his punishment, and awaiting execution he is thrown into prison, where inmates (in Guantanamo Bay orange jump suits) are beaten.

The low comedy scenes define the leniency of the laws under the Duke.  We are in the bordello run by Mistress Overdone (Tamzin Griffin), where the prostitutes, when not plying their trade, watch porn films with the customers.  When Overdone bemoans the fact that Angelo is closing all the houses of prostitution, her pimp Pompey (Richard Katz) assures her, “though you change your place, you need not change your trade.”  Lucio, effectively portrayed by Toby Jones, is a gentleman whose standards are even lower: a duplicitous trouble-maker, he not only disparages the absent Duke but refuses to bail out Pompey when he is thrown in jail. Always optimistic, once there, Pompey cheerfully accepts a job as assistant executioner.

Also in the jail, run by the good-hearted Provost, is Claudio (Ben Mayjes).  The test of Angelo’s reputed virtue is about to begin, even as he emphatically denies the Provost’s suggestion that he too might fall as Claudio has.  Enter the condemned man’s sister Isabella, a novitiate about to become a nun, who has come to Angelo to ask for mercy in her brother’s behalf.  Their two encounters, in which the puritanical Angelo feels himself sexually stirred by Isabella, are dramatic high points.  Mr. Rhys is compelling as Angelo begins his approach, tentatively at first, self-doubting, but growing bolder.  Ms. Frederick as the chaste, unyielding Isabella is impressive as she rebuts his reasons for justice and pleads for mercy.  Their argument escalates, with a subtext that arouses Angelo (confided in an aside to the audience). His tormented, questioning soliloquy follows: “Dost thou desire her foully for those things/That make her good?”  Suspense created, it builds in their next encounter, leading to Angelo’s proposal that Isabella submit to him sexually in exchange for her brother’s life. Outraged, she declines: “More than our brother is our chastity.”  She is equally outraged when her brother, awaiting execution, does not agree.

The Duke succeeds in his attempt to save Isabella by substituting Angelo’s former fiancée Mariana for Isabella at the clandestine seduction.  But Angelo goes back on his agreement to free Claudio after the assignation, and orders his execution. In an excellent portrayal by David Troughton, the Duke, who could seem sanctimonious, becomes human and sympathetic.  Convincingly and beautifully delivered is his speech of consolation to Claudio, “Be absolute for death…”

 It is he who commands the final scene, both the mounting suspense and the resolution, when Isabella is tested: even though she believes her brother is dead (he isn’t), she kneels to ask mercy for Angelo.  The play ends with a mass marriage, a favorite device of Shakespearean comedy.  Realizing that the deputy (as in the source) is not a suitable mate for Isabella, Shakespeare has invented Mariana to pair with Angelo.  And for Isabella? Even Mr. Troughton’s considerable skill cannot quite convince us when he suddenly proposes to her: “Give me your hand, and say you will be mine.”  (National Theatre, South Bank, London SE1 9PX, phone: 020 7452 3000 ) Performance schedule and ticket orders: www.nationaltheatre.org.uk.