As for Christine Horne - other commentators on the IMDb were critical of her, but I thought she was exceptional. Even supporting turns were noteworthy, such as Peter Donaldson, or Emma Campbell (as Emilia) in the climax. Matthew Deslippe was nicely duplicitous as Iago. When Graham Abbey was in The Border, an article had mentioned his theatre background, which was hard to reconcile with his jock-like character in that series, but here he proves that classical expertise. I actually liked the quirky kitchen scenes, as they presented a softer, more cultured side to the character - making his transformation into a wrathful killer more disturbing (even though I'm sure there was an aspect of an "in joke" as earlier in his career, Rota hosted a cooking show!) The cast was quite good. Carlo Rota is very good, making Othello both sympathetic and warm at first, and dangerous and threatening toward the end. They go for a weird hybrid of an intimate film with stage-like sets, creating a unique atmosphere, almost a bubble meta-reality. I thought the look of the thing was sumptuous, the use of colours, the light and shadows - I liked just looking at it. But they managed to make the story poignant, and Othello sympathetic. More than I expected given that, for a contemporary audience, Othello's actions are more those of a creepy stalker than a tragic figure who loved "not wisely". I can only take it for itself - and I found it exceptionally compelling. Maybe it's my lack of expertise on Shakespeare that helped my enjoyment - I'm not noting what lines have been cut, or which speeches shortened. But, honestly, this production of Othello stands very near that.
Othello moor movie#
My favourite Shakespeare movie is Zefferelli's Romeo & Juliet. But over the years I've watched a dozen filmed versions of his plays, from big budget Hollywood spectacles, to simple recorded versions of theatre productions, from Sean Connery as Macbeth to Mel Gibson as Hamlet to Christopher Plummer as Prospero. I'll freely admit: I'm no Shakespeare expert. If, according to your new faith your goodness is never guaranteed, and if all Iago needs is two days to turn a noble convert and trusted military leader into a monster, imagine what he could do if left alone with you.I'm flabbergasted by the low rating here! Particularly since my impression was that when this production first aired, it received generally favourable reviews from the press. The entire nation had recently “converted” to the Church of England. Moors weren’t the only converts, after all. These questions haunt us today, but they were important to Shakespeare’s audience as well. Neither can Othello, who is helped neither by logic, nor by proof, nor friendship, nor even by language, because all of these normal ways of making sense of the world have been arrayed in a conspiracy against him by Iago.Īll along, the play is asking what makes a person, what is identity, and how belonging to an identity group shapes who you are. Hamlet can’t reason his way out of the trap of the self. “If Richard III had had a straight back, would he be a good person? Is his crooked back a sign that he is a bad person, or do we treat people with crooked backs badly?” To Spiro, the terrifying note Shakespeare sounds again and again, despite being a word-drunk pioneer of the English language, is that talking about it doesn’t help. “In Twelfth Night you have the idea that you could make someone insane simply by telling him he’s insane,” Spiro said. Throughout his career, Shakespeare was conflicted about identity at the moment when the question What is an Englishman? was as vital to his audience as questions about identity are to us today. “If Othello really is that decent, honest, and credulous, if he can really have friends and be loved by a beautiful woman, the white characters in the play can’t accept it,” Spiro said.
In Shakespeare’s time, Moors could be from Africa, but they could also be from the Middle East, or even Spain. Although Othello is a Moor, and although we often assume he is from Africa, he never names his birthplace in the play.
Othello moor skin#
He meant instead someone with darker skin than an Englishman at a time when Englishmen were very, very pale. When Shakespeare used the word “black” he was not exactly describing a race the way we would.
Shakespeare’s writing mostly predates the transatlantic slave trade and the more modern obsession with biological classification, both of which gave rise to our contemporary ideas of race. What people mean when they ask if Othello is black is: What did Shakespeare mean when he called Othello black? Would we say Othello is black today?
Is Othello black? With the news that David Oyelowo will play Othello opposite Daniel Craig’s Iago and that the Metropolitan Opera is finally discontinuing the practice of blackface in productions of Otello, we may see a revival of this oft-asked question.