(Above: Giles Terera as Othello and Paul Hilton as Iago from the National Theatre production of Othello. Photo by Myah Jeffers.)
O2 is owned by Virgin Media O2, a 50:50 joint venture between Telefónica and Liberty Global, and is the largest mobile network in Britain with around 32 million subscribers. It is also the name of the arena where musical artists who can fill arenas play in London. Elton John is having a 10-night stand there in April and May. On December 22nd, Disney on Ice starts its own multi-date stand. That kind of place. It floats like a cloud smarting with such a smorgasbord of entertainment above oft-cloudy London - specifically its O2 Cloud app it’s been suggested I download. Referencing it was an obvious choice for a title regarding this column about Othello at The National Theatre and Orlando in the West End. But explaining it was also an obvious requirement to American readers.
The cloud that floats over the smart new production of Othello at the National, which is directed by the theatre’s Deputy Artistic Director Clint Dyer (the first Black person to direct it at The National, who also directed the West End’s Get Up, Stand Up!, The Bob Marley Musical I’ve seen three times so far) and which stars the brilliant Giles Terera in the title role, is seeded with all the actors portraying Othello in the past, some of whom used blackface, an enhancement that has rightly come to be considered a racist one. Indeed, there are projections of those past productions on Chloe Lamford’s spare arena-like set confronting the audience as it enters the Lyttelton Theatre. A janitorial supernumerary enters before the play itself starts and mops up the floor as if to tell us that what we are about to witness is a ritualized cleansing of the National of its racist past - although not its classist one, I presume. When Dyer first saw a production at the National in the 1980s, in fact, he was confronted with a portrait of Laurence Olivier, the theatre’s first Artistic Director, as Othello in blackface hanging prominently on a wall. It was from the production in 1964 that John Dexter directed. Dyer took out a pen and wrote SHAME ON YOU in the whites of Olivier’s eyes.
Bosley Crowther, The New York Times film critic in 1966, wrote much more than that in his review of the film version of Olivier’s Othello. “Seeing as how the drama critics in England were unstinting in their praise of the lush stage production of Othello in which Sir Laurence Olivier played with the National Theater of Great Britain a couple of years ago, it may seem rude of an American film critic to voice some startled exceptions to the motion picture made of the play by a British company,” he began his review. “This finely photographed Othello, in color, will be shown today and tomorrow at matinees and evening performances in 51 theaters in the metropolitan area. However, one bold and singular aspect of this production immediately impels the sensitive American viewer into a baffled and discomfited attitude. That is the radical makeup Sir Laurence has chosen to use in his powerful and passionate characterization of the jealous Moor. He plays Othello in blackface! That's right, blackface - not the dark-brown stain that even the most daring white actors do not nowadays wish to go beyond. What's more, he caps his shiny blackface with a wig of kinky black hair and he has the insides of his lips smeared and thickened with a startling raspberry red. Several times, in his rages or reflections, he rolls his eyes up into his head so that the whites gleam like small milk agates out of the inky face. The consequence is that he hits one - the sensitive American, anyhow- with the by-now outrageous impression of a theatrical Negro stereotype. He does not look like a Negro (if that's what he's aiming to make the Moor)—not even a West Indian chieftain, which some of the London critics likened him to. He looks like a Rastus or an end man in an American minstrel show. You almost wait for him to whip a banjo out from his flowing, white garments or start banging a tambourine. What's more, he speaks at the beginning in a deep, densely dignified voice that distractingly reminded this viewer of Amos in the old Amos 'n' Andy radio serial.”
In Laurence Olivier on Screen, the author Foster Hirsch claimed however that the actor based his vocal rhythms in the role “on West Indians he had studied in the street and pubs of London with the shrewd ear of a mimic.” Moreover, Sammy Davis Jr once told David Frost on the latter’s talk show that Olivier had been in the wings of the Prince of Wales theatre “at least four or five times a week” to study his act in the early 1960s. Olivier’s entrance as Othello as he fondled a red rose was modeled, according to Davis, on the way the singer could caress his microphone. He also insisted that Olivier had copied his way of moving and told Frost and his studio audience that he was “so complimented” by Olivier’s embedding him into his characterization of Othello instead of feeling a Caucasian actor’s condescension in the embedment. Terera, who won an Olivier Award for his portrayal of Aaron Burr in Hamilton, was even at one point slated to portray Sammy Davis, Jr., in a musical about his life at the Lyric Hammersmith Theatre in the summer of 2020, but I believe the production was postponed since I can’t find any reviews of it once it was announced.
Sammy Davis, Jr., was himself the Black embed in the Whites-only Rat Pack just as Terera is the lone Black actor in the cast of this production which turns the supporting roles into a pack of white rats in a racist maze, so much so that it becomes like a controlled study of racism itself - specifically systemic racism since the chorus effect that Dyer employs with the actors sitting about the spareness of the arena-like set is referred to as The System. The feel of the costumes and the overarching concept is a fascistic one - Black Shirted instead of Brown Shirted. Much like America after Obama rose to power within such a system buttressed by White entitlement, the Venice in this production is not the more enlightened society that Othello had hoped it would be, an advanced one reflecting his own advancement to the rank of general, but the setting for a seething atavism, one that asserts White privilege and prerogative when so baldly confronted with a Black man who has attained power. Too trumped up a thesis? Ask post-Obama America. There is more than a bit of Obama, in fact, in Terera’s take on the title character, that steely elegance and storied eloquence that cut though the vulgar appeal of racism that the American president utilized and now Terera’s take on the tragic Shakespearean character has as well to ascend to such powerful stations in life within such societal contexts.
There is a term in Britain: go spare which means to be extremely angry or distraught. Because of the lissom elan of Terera’s Othello, when he goes spare on that spare set, it is troubling within his deeply moving and singular characterization of the Moorish general but thrilling as well as we witness an actor of greatness grappling with this role. I also admired the dashing Casio of Rory Fleck Byrne who burrows deeply into the narrative to emerge, as the actor does, as its rousted romantic lead. Paul Hilton - who played E.M. Forster in The Inheritance at the Young Vic, in the West End, and on Broadway - is, fitting into the fascist feel of it all, a kind of Oswald Mosley-like villain, his reedy sinisterness manifesting as physical abuse in a scene with his wife Emilia portrayed with a heroic, heightened humility by Tanya Franks. The Desdemona of Rosy McEwen is daringly unsentimental; her love for Othello is just part of her certainty about her own identity as a woman, which is ironic once Othello turns uncertain in his paranoia when faced with the lies about her and convinces himself that her female wiles outweigh the allure of her intellect. It is the wiles of villainy however which outweigh all else in this tragedy. There were times I did wonder if Othello’s paranoia could be a general’s PTSD. Battle has been itself so burrowed into his own narrative - embedded - that it is all he knows and even love, when engaged, becomes his enemy.
I had seen Terera in the stereotypical role of the gay best friend in a previous production here at The National, the glorious Blues for an Alabama Sky which was set during the Harlem Renaissance. But he was anything but stereotypical, reflecting the singularity of the play. I am sure he was guided in that by that singular voice of the playwright Pearl Cleage and the wondrous direction of Lynne Linton. But it proves what a brilliant actor he is that within a matter of three weeks I saw him in these two very different roles and he deeply convinced me in both that he was each man. They did share a dignity they each had fought hard not to attain but for it to be recognized as part of their makeup as men. I have written about embedment a lot already but the dignity of each of these characters was layered with that of the actor’s itself that forms the bedrock and backbone of his talent. After seeing Othello, however, and thinking about how our greatest Black actors are now being finally cast in the role, it did dawn on me to wonder if Terera were gay - I decided he must be - and that is why he was freed to mine the humanity of an overtly gay - proudly gay - character in Blues for an Alabama Sky in ways that had nothing to do with sexuality, which finally does not define what one does but who one is. Sexuality is more than an action; it is a state of being. In that regard, Dyer, as a Black director, was freed to mine the misogyny, yes, embedded in text of Shakespeare’s Othello. He has limned the production with that systemic racism that serves as the tragic societal arc framing the play and inflaming that text, but his race gave him the empathy in 2022 that Othello could not summon in the early 1570s for a female who also had to fight the misconceptions which entrapped her. I began to watch the play with my white gaze but ended it seeing it with my male one.
(Above: Michael Grandage and Emma Corrin. Photographed by Graeme Robertson for The Guardian.)
The male gaze and female gaze - or is it their one gaze - peer(s) out at you from Orlando, both in Virginia Woolf’s original text and in the streamlined fascinatingly facile version of it that Michael Grandage has directed from an adaptation by Neil Bartlett which stars the mesmerizing nonbinary English actor Emma Corrin in the title role. It is being presented at the Garrick Theatre on the West End by The Grandage Company. In another review in The New York Times, this one by Cleveland B. Chase when Woolf’s book was originally published in 1928, the term “queer” is presciently dropped into it long before the term “genderqueer” could be used to describe not only the fictional character but also the actor who is now portraying them, which I just assume is Orlando’s preferred pronoun these days because I presume, as does Bartlett in his version, that they walk among us still.
“Those who open Orlando expecting another novel in the vein of Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse will discover, to their joy or sorrow, that once more Mrs. Woolf has broken with tradition and convention and has set out to explore still another fourth dimension of writing,” Chase began his review in 1928. “Not that she has abandoned the ‘stream of consciousness’ method which she used with such conspicuous success in her previous novels, but with it she has combined what, for lack of a better term, we might describe as an application to writing of the Einstein theory of relativity. In this new work she is largely preoccupied with the ‘time’ element in character and human relationships, and with a statement of the exact complexion of that intangible moment, a combination of past and future, of objective reality and subjective consciousness, which we refer to as the present.
“An hour [she explained], once it lodges in the queer element of the human spirit, may be stretched to fifty or one hundred times its clock length: on the other hand, an hour may be accurately represented on the timepiece of the mind by one second. The most successful practitioners of the art of life, often unknown people by the way, somehow contrive to synchronize the sixty or seventy different times which beat simultaneously in every normal human system so that when eleven strikes, all the rest chime in unison, and the present is neither a violent disruption nor completely forgotten in the past. Of them we can justly say that they live precisely the sixty-eight or seventy-two years allotted them on the tombstone. Of the rest, some we know to be dead, though they walk among us; others are hundreds of years old, though they call themselves 36.
“Mrs. Woolf’s hero-heroine is hundreds of years old. At the beginning of the book Orlando is a boy of 16, melancholy, indolent, loving solitude and given to writing poetry; the age is the Elizabethan; the book ends on the 11th of October, 1928, and Orlando is a thoroughly modern matron of 36, who has published a successful book of poems and has evolved a hard-earned philosophy of life. Thus, to express her very modern fourth-dimensional concepts, Mrs. Woolf has fallen back upon one of the most ancient of literary forms, the allegory.”
What Chase does not do is allude to Woolf’s bisexuality and her love of poet Vita Sackville-West which was the impetus to write the novel that has been hailed as a feminist tract and has in the almost century since it was published become part of the core curriculum of gender and transgender study programs. After their intense love affair, the two women remained friends although Woolf seemed hurt by the even more deeply bohemian Sackville-West’s shrugging off any need to be monogamous which to her just put bourgeois parameters on love and turned it into but a heightened version of monotony. On some level, Woolf’s writing of Orlando - which she based on the family history culled from her conversations and life lived alongside her lover and friend - was a romantic ramble as much as it was an experimental narrative arc; it was a way to stay passionately attached to Sackville-West, if not physically so. Woolf wrote in a journal entry dated 5 October 1927: "And instantly the usual exciting devices enter my mind: a biography beginning in the year 1500 and continuing to the present day, called Orlando: Vita; only with a change about from one sex to the other.” Indeed, Sackville-West’s son, Nigel Nicolson, who co-founded with George Weidenfeld the publishing house Weidenfeld & Nicolson, has claimed that “the effect of my mother on Virginia is all contained in Orlando, the longest and most charming love letter in literature, in which she explores Vita, weaves her in and out of the centuries, tosses her from one sex to the other, plays with her, dresses her in furs, lace and emeralds, teases her, flirts with her, drops a veil of mist around her.”
Emerging from that mist - de-mistifying her, if you will - is the refreshing clarity that Corrin brings to all their roles. From the dangerous demureness of Princess Diana in The Crown to the bravura bravery they display as Lady Chatterly in D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterly’s Lover adapted by screenwriter David Magee and directed by Laura de Clermont-Tonnerre to their role as the wronged wife angrily constricted by sorrow and regret and a longing to be longed-for stranded in the narrative’s marriage but serving as the same narrative’s companion that carries it forward in its muted grandeur that reflects that same aspect they have mined in their character in director Grandage’s recent film My Policeman, Corrin’s talent is how they continue to hone their all-embracing honesty without being profligate about it. There is honor in their honesty as a person which translates to a kind of regality to their being and their bearing without ever having to stoop to being a royal pain about it. They are a new kind of sex symbol whose allure does not depend on objectification but on all those multi-defined gazes that take them in to do so in such a way that subject the gazers to an object lesson about who they actually are and what it is about Corrin’s inclusive being that stirs in them not only desire but a kind of internal debate that can stir them in daring ways. Corrin’s very presence is the dare they took themself; their talent as an actor is the result of accepting that dare.
Like in the version of Othello devised by Dyer, there is a Greek chorus-like devise dramatically invented by Bartlett and beautifully realized by Grandage as Woolf after Woolf after Woolf of different races and sizes and genders, all dressed alike, make their entrances onstage to begin the play and are a presence throughout. We are guided in Orlando’s journey by the character’s servant Mrs Grimsditch portrayed with a kind of panto-panache by Deborah Findlay. But what to do about Woolf having stopped the narrative in the year of its publication, 1928, when the conceit of it all would mean that it would still be going on in 2022? Grandage and Bartlett have come up with a deeply moving solution that is just as movingly and deeply manifested by Corrin as they bring it all as a person and and as an actor not only up-to-date but up to the mindful moment each night that the curtain falls on this ravishingly fresh take on this revolutionary text.
I was unexpectedly reminded at the end of the production of a quote from Sylvia Plath, another feminist writer who, like Woolf, committed suicide here in England. Plath, also like Woolf, was a big letter and journal writer. She carried on a correspondence at one point with a 21-year-old English major from Chicago named Eddie Cohen who wrote to her after reading her first published short story which appeared in Seventeen magazine. She was only 18 and about to head off to Smith and then to Newnham College at Cambridge. At one point he seems to have written to her about the Doomday Clock being poised dangerously close to midnight. Within the letter she wrote back to him, dated September 11, 1950, she claimed, “I want to escape . . . to get off into a dimension where I’ll be safe. It’s getting so I live every moment with terrible intensity. Last night, driving back from Boston, I lay back in the car and let the colored lights come at me, the music from the radio, and the reflection of the guy driving. It all flowed over me with a screaming ache of pain . . . remember, remember, this is now, and now and now. Live it, feel it, cling to it. I don’t want to blot the fear out, and blur the edges of living now.”
There is a symbolical - dimensional - sense of nowness that begins the production of Othello at the National Theatre and a literal one that ends the allegorical Orlando’s production in the West End. Taken together, they are tales of bigotry and gender although one is tragic and the other hopeful. And yet there is the nowness of hope in a Black director directing Othello starring a Black actor at the National Theatre. The hopeful nowness is there in Orlando as well. Woolf romantically embedded it there for her own emotional purposes. But a nonbinary actor of Corrin’s brilliance and appeal has deepened it with their singular doubled-portrayal of Orlando. They and Terera are embodying the nowness of that hope.