I’ve been reviewing the RSC in Stratford for 14 years now and I have never known it hit such a vein of consistently fine form as the first half of 2015. This is the fifth superlative show in a row and Iqbal Khan’s muscular modern-dress production offers a thought-provoking twist: Iago is black, as well as Othello.
The play is thus about racism of a subtly different sort: has Othello (Hugh Quarshie) preferred Cassio (Jacob Fortune-Lloyd) to Iago (Lucian Msamati) for racial reasons of his own? There’s a magnetic moment during the raucous knees-up in Cyprus when the assembled men start beat-boxing and sharp race-based undercurrents suddenly bubble up out of nowhere.
The great advantage of all this is that it makes for a focused and compelling five-act showdown between Quarshie’s statesmanlike dignity and Msamati’s streetwise conniving. The drawback is that Joanna Vanderham’s harsh, unmoving Desdemona is reduced to little more than a sideshow on Ciaran Bagnall’s elegant set of arches and arcades. Ayesha Dharker provides passionate support as Emilia. The RSC can’t possibly make it to six consecutive hit plays. Can it?
In rep until August 28; rsc.org.uk
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