English-language Shakespeare has a long history in Prague, possibly dating back to the sixteenth century and certainly as far as 1603. This year, the Prague Shakespeare Company returns the favour, bringing the Bard back to the UK with a trio of performances: Hamlet, Love’s Labour’s Lost and Othello.
Their Othello is a tight, focussed, dash through the classic tale of love, passion, resentment and jealousy. At just 75 minutes, the story doesn’t have a lot of room to breathe, and some subtleties are undoubtedly lost, but it is efficiently told and retains its propulsive build towards disaster.
That disaster being, of course, the destruction of the ‘Moor’ Othello, a black general in the Venetian army who is resented by his ensign Iago. Iago vows to bring Othello to his knees, primarily by planting seeds of suspicion in his mind regarding his new (and white) wife Desdemona (Rosie Ward).
Othello is played with muscular poise and calm by Aldo Billingslea. His utter self-confidence when facing down Brabantio – horrified that his daughter Desdemona has married a black man – feels rooted not just in his occupation of the moral high ground, but his reassuring physical presence. Although even in this introductory scene, his naïve belief that being in the right and an exceptional soldier will be enough to protect him prefigures the fall that is to come.
As the plot races to its conclusion, it is not just in his disintegrating poise that Billingslea lets us see Othello’s unravelling. His clothes come undone and his form swells with what looks like a body builder’s roid rage. In a world where black men’s bodies are still judged and policed differently, Billingslea’s use of his physicality in Othello’s ruin at the hands of a white man brings the threat faced by this seventeenth-century man firmly into the present.
Opposite Billingslea is Matthew Radford Davies as Iago. He makes for a chummy, bluff betrayer, welcoming the audience into his confidences and implicating us in his plot to destroy Othello. Davies’ Iago is initially full of glee at his success, but seemingly becomes increasingly unnerved at the power he has unleashed in his enraged victim.
By the end, cornered and desperate, he presents a powerless, pathetic figure caught up in events of his making but now beyond his control. His murder of Emilia seems not like a fit of passionate rage but the last desperate actions of a controlling husband whose life is crumbling around him.
Elsewhere, Jim Johnson is excellent as a wheedling Brabantio, his disgust at Othello’s blackness palpable. Martin Florez brings Disney sidekick energy to Iago’s partner-in-crime Roderigo, pathetically in over his head as Iago manipulates him. Carolyn Johnson plays Emilia as a rather modern abused wife – firmly in the control of her toxic husband, seeking his love but doomed to be forever used and rejected by him.
As well as contemporary inflections to some of the characterisation, there are other hints the production is angling for modern resonances. Although the courtly characters wear period dress, the soldiers are in twentieth-century combat fatigues, carrying modern pistols alongside their daggers.
Aside from its brevity, the Prague Shakespeare Company aren’t seeking to reinvent Othello with this production. Instead, they appear to be aiming for a well-told, well-presented version that is accessible and relevant to a twenty-first-century Fringe audience, and this is exactly what they deliver.
Performed at C Arts on 10 August as part of the Edinburgh Fringe
10-11 August, 19:20
Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes, no interval
Written by William Shakespeare
Directed by Guy Roberts and Rosie Ward
Performed by the Prague Shakespeare Company, cast includes Aldo Billingslea, Matthew Radford Davies, Rosie Ward, Carolyn Johnson and Jim Johnson