Read how Laurence Olivier’s performance of Othello in 1964 radically reimagined the character Othello as a narcissistic and self-dramatising character.
‘It took careful wooing to talk Olivier into Othello, the only major role in Shakespearean tragedy that he had not played. He pointed out that no English actor in this century had succeeded in the part. The play, he said, belonged to Iago, who could always make the Moor look a credulous idiot. “If I take it on,” he said, “I don't want a witty, Machiavellian Iago. I want a solid, honest-to-God N.C.O.” The director, John Dexter, fully agreed with this approach.
Soon afterwards I passed on the news to Orson Welles, himself a former Othello, He voiced an instant doubt. “Larry's a natural tenor,” he rumbled, “and Othello's a natural baritone.” When I mentioned this to Olivier there followed weeks of daily voice lessons that throbbed through the plywood walls of the National Theatre's temporary offices near Waterloo Bridge. When the cast assembled to read the play Olivier's voice was an octave lower than any of us had ever heard it.
Dexter (the director) in his preliminary speech before rehearsals began declared pride to be the key to all the characters, especially to that of Othello; already he was touching on the theme that was to be the concealed mainspring of the production – the idea of Othello as a man essentially narcissistic and self-dramatising.
“Othello,” Dexter told the cast, is a pompous, word-spinning arrogant black general. At any rate, that's how you ought to see him. The important thing is not to accept him at his own valuation. Try to look at him objectively. He isn't just a righteous man who's been wronged. He's a man too proud to think he could ever be capable of anything as a base as jealousy. When he learns that he can be jealous, his character changes. The knowledge destroys him, and he goes berserk. Now let's have a good loud reading this afternoon.”
The first read through was a shattering experience. Normally on these occasions the actors do not exert themselves. They sit in a circle and mumble, more concerned with getting to know one another than with giving a performance. Into this polite gathering Olivier tossed a hand-grenade. He delivered the works – a fantastic, full-volume display that scorched one's ears, serving final notice on everyone present that the hero, storm-centre and focal point of the tragedy was the man named in the title. Seated, bespectacled and lounge-suited, he fell on the text like a tiger. This was not a noble, “civilised” Othello but a triumphant black despot, aflame with unadmitted self-regard. So far from letting Iago manipulate him, he seemed to manipulate Iago, treating him as a kind of court jester. Such contumely cried out for deflation.
There are moral flaws in every other Shakespearean hero, but Othello is traditionally held to be exempt. Olivier's reading made us realise that tradition might be wrong; that Othello was flawed indeed with the sin of pride. At the power of his voice, the windows shook and my scalp tingled. A natural force had entered the room, stark and harsh, with vowel-sounds subtly alien as Kwame Nkrumah's; and the cast listened pole-axed.
I wondered at the risks he was taking. Mightn't the knock down arrogance of this interpretation verge to closely for comfort on comedy? Wasn't he doing to Othello precisely what he deplored in the Peter Brook - Paul Schofield “King Lear” – i.e. cutting the hero down to size and slicing away his majesty? Then he came to “farewell the plumed troop,” and again the hair rose on my neck. It was like the dying moan of a fighting bull.
Like the cast, I was awed, We were learning what it meant to be faced with a great classical actor in full spate – one whose vocal range was so immense that by a single new inflection he could point the way to a whole new interpretation. Every speech, for Olivier, is like a mass of marble at which the sculptor chips away until its essential form and meaning are revealed. No matter how ignoble the character he plays, the result is always noble as a work of art.’
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