[In the following excerpted review of the 1999 Royal Shakespeare Company staging of Othello directed by Michael Attenborough, Duncan-Jones praises the liveliness and clarity of the production, particularly the “assured and charismatic” performance of Ray Fearon as Othello.]

The play [Othello] opens as a lively Jonsonian comedy, with the fascinatingly manipulative Iago running rings round the idiotic Roderigo (Aidan McArdle, something of a Roberto Benigni lookalike). As in a Jonson comedy, the audience are given no emotional option but to respond to the trickster's juicy cleverness. Then the play rapidly becomes a different kind of comedy: the kind in which, in the face of fierce parental opposition, a young couple in love are allowed to marry. This Othello is by no means “descended / into the vale of years”, and a few lines have had to be cut to accommodate his youthfulness. But the thirty-one-year-old Ray Fearon's performance is so assured and charismatic, and his verse-speaking so consistently excellent, that in practice little seems to be lost. A surprising consequence of his assurance is that race seems scarcely an issue. This Othello has poise, control, natural authority, and an instinctive ability to impress the middle-aged men in grey suits here known as the Venetian Signory. Not only does Iago detest Othello for his manifest “promotability”, he also resents his capacity to control others with a light touch (“Keep up your bright swords …”) and, furthermore, he is strongly attracted to him physically, though this doesn't fully appear until the horrible blood-bonding that seals their pact, “I am your own for ever”, with the joining of slashed and bleeding hands. Neither Iago's resentment nor his attraction seem much connected explicitly with Othello's racial difference. There may be good reasons for this. In 1999, aware of such men as Nelson Mandela and Kofi Annan, we are starting to take it for granted that “white” wars may require “black” moderators. The Venetian state's need for Othello seems now almost a truism, not a paradox.

Comic values are maintained after the arrival at Cyprus, not in the embarrassing backchat between Iago and Desdemona about the nature of a good wife, which is cut, but in the soldiers' drinking party. The “sport and revels” for the General's wedding are made enjoyably festive, with fireworks, trays of cocktails and military drinking rituals, and the happily kittenish enthusiasm of Desdemona (Zoe Waites) for her new husband. This visually crisp production uses the new depth of the stage effectively for scenes of half-heard and misunderstood exchanges. When Othello urgently asks, entering back stage, “Was not that Cassio parted from my wife?” we want to yell out, as in a pantomime, “Yes, we've just seen him”. But, of course, this is no pantomime, in spite of some Demon King-like stunts from Richard McCabe. Ray Fearon enacts Othello's collapse into disordered thinking and manic violence with terrifying cogency. The production's unusual clarity both of action and speech ensures that nothing is lost, and that even when tragedy risks slipping into melodrama, in lines such as “O Desdemon! Dead Desdemon! Dead! O! O!”, it does not do so. This is the best interpretation of a Shakespeare tragedy that I have seen at Stratford this decade.