The Actor and the Moor
Olivier: The Actor and the MoorBy Kenneth Tynan
This is a condensed version of the essay that appeared in Othello: The National Theatre Production ed. Kenneth Tynan (Rupert Hart Davis, 1966).
| Othello
Laurence Olivier and Maggie Smith Poster designed by Ken Biggs and Associates |
My theme is the growth of a performance, first mooted early in 1963 and brought to birth at the Old Vic Theatre on April 23, 1964, in honour of William Shakespeare's four-hundredth birthday. It was not easy to persuade him to play Othello. At least, he made it seem difficult; perhaps, deep in his personal labyrinth, where the Minotaur of his talent lurks, he had already decided, and merely wanted to be coaxed. Elia Kazan once told me that the adjective he would choose to sum up Olivier was “girlish.” When I looked baffled, he elaborated: “I don't mean that he's effeminate – just that he's coy, he's vain, he has tantrums, he needs to be wooed.” It took careful wooing to talk him 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 – and he spoke with authority, since he had played Iago to Ralph Richardson's Othello in 1938. “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. He and Olivier went through the play in depth and detail, at the end of which process the National Theatre had cast its Othello.
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, he gave me what Peter O'Toole has expressively called “that grey-eyed myopic stare that can turn you into stone.” 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 (on February 3 1964), Olivier's voice was an octave lower than any of us had ever heard it.
| Maggie Smith and Olivier in rehearsal for Othello Photo Angus McBean |
Dexter, dapper and downright, made a bold preliminary speech. After two or three days of “blocking” (i.e. working out the moves), there would be a first run-through with books. Of the text as a whole, he said that “this is the most headlong of plays”; for the purposes of this production, it would be assumed that the action took place within roughly forty-eight hours – a night in Venice, a night in Cyprus, and a final night during which Desdemona is killed. The settings (by Jocelyn Herbert) would be sparse and simple, with no elaborate scene-changes and almost nothing in the way of furniture except the indispensable nuptial couch. Pride, he said, was 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. The germ of this came from a famous essay by Dr. F. R. Leavis, which Dexter and I had already studied with Olivier. “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.
| Lawrence Olivier as Othello and Maggie Smith as Desdemona photo Angus McBean |
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. I realised how vital, for an actor, is the use to which he puts the time available to him before his bodily resources begin to flag. In the last fifteen years Olivier had played more than twenty stage parts, ancient and modern. During the same period Marlon Brando – once, potentially, an American Olivier – had not appeared on stage at all. He had the quality; but quantity is the practice that makes quality perfect.
Act I/ Scene 3
Othello, a fully “assimilated” Moor, wears a crucifix round his neck and crosses himself when Brabantio accuses him of having won Desdemona's love with witchcraft. For the great account of the wooing, he is still and central. On “This only witchcraft I have used,” Olivier isolates the word “witchcraft” so that you can almost hear the inverted commas, deliberately making the second vowel harsh and African, and pointedly eyeing Brabantio as he delivers it. Throughout the speech, he is at once the Duke's servant and the white man's master. Every time we rehearse it, the room is pin-still. For some of us this is the high point of the performance.
Act V / Scene 2
The killing of Desdemona in the bedroom. Entrance of Othello: white robbed and dark-limbed, picked out by a shaft of moonlight through a grille over the chamber door. On “Who's there?”, Desdemona wakes up in a convulsion of fear, as if from a nightmare then says with a sigh of relief; “Othello!” The “murder which I thought a sacrifice” is accomplished with relentless, implacable precision; honour having been offended, the prescribed penalty must be enforced.
Turning point of the case against Iago: Emila can prove that her husband is a dirty-minded gossip-monger, but not until Othello reveals that he has seen Cassio with the handkerchief (“I saw it in his hand”) can prove that Iago is guilty of conspiracy to murder. It takes her a second or two to react to the implications of what Othello has said; but she then bursts out with “O God! O heavenly God!” – and after this clinching double-take it is all up with Iago, since she now reveals that she gave him the handkerchief. The end of Iago: he offers himself masochistically to Othello's sword. “I bleed, sir; but not kill'd” is spoken with quiet satisfaction. The end of Othello: kneeling on the bed, hugging the limp corpse of Desdemona, he slashes his throat with the hidden stiletto we saw in III.3. And slumps like a falling tower.
About six months after the production opened, the Italian director Franco Zeffirelli saw it for the first time. Of Olivier's performance he said: “I was told that this was the last flourish of the romantic tradition of acting. It's nothing of the sort. It's an anthology of everything that has been discovered about acting in the last three centuries. It's grand and majestic, but it's also modern and realistic. I would call it a lesson for us all.”
