Othello
Stuart Burge (1965)
The closest that I’ve so far come to being hit by other members of the audience or disciplined by cinema staff was while I and my friends were watching the 1980 remake of The Jazz Singer in Cambridge. Neil Diamond in the title role couldn’t act at all. Laurence Olivier as Cantor Rabinovitch, the Diamond character’s father, decided to do enough acting for – well, many more than two. In Jewish tradition, clothes may be rent at news of a death. There’s a moment in The Jazz Singer when Cantor Rabinovitch is so appalled by his showbiz son’s behaviour that he wishes to signal that the younger man is dead to him. When Olivier starts tearing at his clothes, the contrast between his theatrical verve and Neil Diamond’s inertia is – a phrase that I normally try to avoid – laugh-out-loud funny, although it wasn’t to the people sitting near us in the Cambridge cinema. Olivier’s legendary interpretation of Othello isn’t that but I needed several times to repress laughter: I kept thinking how Sally, if she’d been there, would have reacted to his amazing histrionics. (She’d have rolled her eyes almost as much as Olivier does here.)
In the half-century since this film was made, Olivier’s playing of Othello has been much criticised on racial grounds; it’s still a cause for gratitude, though, that it was recorded on celluloid. The picture is rather more than a filmed record of the National Theatre Othello staged in 1964 under the direction of John Dexter. Stuart Burge’s adaptation (photographed by Geoffrey Unsworth) makes modest but intelligent adjustments for cinema. There are scene changes but no more than you’d expect to see in the theatre. Enlarged duplicates of the original stage sets were used (one of these – with pillars against an ominous orange background – brings to mind de Chirico). The film includes other performances which it’s good to have for posterity – from Frank Finlay (Iago), Maggie Smith (Desdemona), Joyce Redman (Emilia), Derek Jacobi (Cassio) and Robert Lang (Roderigo) – but Olivier is unquestionably the star. If I had to summarise in three words his Othello and his Jewish father in The Jazz Singer they would, however, be the same three words: phenomenal yet ridiculous.
Olivier wears blackface (and the make-up really is dark: the BFI programme note included an interesting contemporary review by Isabel Quigly in The Spectator, which describes Olivier’s face colouring as ‘black, almost purplish-black’). This alone is more than enough to offend modern racial sensibilities but Olivier also uses pink lips and the red-edged whites of his eyes to emphasise the Moor’s ethnicity. Olivier’s Othello is, both visually and vocally, the essence of exotic. (The accent is best described as sui generis – it veers between Asian and Indian, Irish and Welsh.) Olivier’s physical transformation is a considerable technical feat. The actor was approaching sixty at the time: whatever you think of him, he had, among the actors of his generation, a unique appetite for going to new and surprising places in his choice and playing of roles in late middle age. Olivier’s Archie Rice is the outstanding artistic achievement of this period but his Othello is a memorable corporeal expression of his sustained ambitiousness. Yet the startling animality of his presence here – even allowing for the fact that the colour of Othello’s skin, and how this is perceived by other characters, is integral to Shakespeare’s play – is offensive because Olivier appears to think it’s a quality particular to a black man. The same applies to the deepening and enriching of his speaking voice to make it extra-sonorous and ‘musical’; this also seems to derive from racial stereotyping.
If Olivier’s portrait is to be condemned today as benighted, so too is Pauline Kael’s expression of admiration for it:
‘… [What] Negro actor at this stage in the world’s history could dare bring to the role the effrontery that Olivier does, and which Negro actor could give it this reading? … Possibly Negro actors need to sharpen themselves on white roles before they can play a Negro. It is not enough to be: for great drama, it is the awareness that is everything.’
Even if one ignores the matter of how easily (or not!) ‘Negro’ actors were able to come by ‘white roles’ fifty years ago, it’s hard not to be angered by Kael’s comments. She seems to imply both that black actors may not be sufficiently ‘aware’ of their ethnicity – and that Othello’s blackness needs to be dramatised by the actor playing him. That’s surely not so when the words of other dramatis personae already do the job.
My difficulties with Olivier’s performance extend beyond the unease about racial aspects which, at this distance in time, it’s impossible not to feel. He brings his extraordinary talents to bear on Othello’s appearance, voice, gesture and movement: except for the dubious accent and for occasional hand movements that are overly defined, these elements are remarkably orchestrated. Yet this concentration on the externals – and their spellbinding effect – makes the internal workings of Othello secondary. As a result, the characterisation is incomplete. One doesn’t get, for example, a strong sense of Othello as a professional soldier (as distinct from an exciting exotic adventurer). And although he has fewer lines than Iago, Olivier’s luxuriating in them makes Othello seem much the talkier of the two – he comes across as a vain windbag. You have to wonder if the vanity is that of the man playing him. When Olivier is prepared to connect with another actor, he’s deeply impressive – as when, for example, he listens to the story that Iago is concocting or, in the final act, when Othello realises how he’s been deceived. In the latter moment, Olivier looks into camera but essentially straight at Iago; it’s as if he then remembers he needs to do something spectacular with his eyes and the performance reverts to the actor’s admiring his own art. When Emilia comes to the bed chamber and Othello wants rid of her so that he can be alone with Desdemona, he tells Emilia to leave but Olivier is immediately distracted by the possibility of vocal flourishes: he seems to forget he wants her out of the way. I know that playing Shakespeare isn’t all about ‘realism’ and ‘truthfulness’ according to the conventions of naturalistic acting but Olivier’s egocentricity tends to get in the way of the drama. He does not ‘serve the playwright’.
Frank Finlay does a brilliant job of integrating the opposing qualities of Iago: lethal but mediocre; seductive and repellent; serious and careful, yet amused by how easily he can fool Othello. He speaks honeyed words and is ‘honest Iago’ through his matter-of-factness. In describing Olivier’s as ‘a stage performance’, Isabel Quigly underrates his expertise in front of a camera; Frank Finlay, especially given the huge number of lines he has to speak (according to Wikipedia, 1117 – compared with Olivier’s 856), is also very persuasive as a screen actor. Quigly is right only to the extent that, because Finlay’s playing is ‘smaller’ than Olivier’s, it’s more consistently scaled to the medium. One has become so used to Maggie Smith’s eccentricity that her natural, unmannered Desdemona is refreshing and absorbing. At the same time, Smith’s propensity for savouring and decorating lines is very effective when it occasionally breaks through – it suggests an effervescence that Desdemona knows when to keep a lid on. Joyce Redman’s Emilia seems a little too richly spoken at first but she always conveys convincingly the character’s devotion to her mistress and Redman is very fine, and moving, in the bedchamber scene. As Cassio, the young Derek Jacobi is more varied than one’s come to expect: although some of what he does sticks out as theatrical, Jacobi creates an interesting mix of suavity, ambition and ingenuousness. Robert Lang is impressive as the foolish but, in this characterisation, driven Roderigo. The two songs are well performed. Watching the film, which retains virtually all the scenes of the play (and their order), made me realise how concentrated the story of Othello is – there’s hardly any subplot.
14 December 2014