Cici Zhang’s directorial take on Othello was something I’d heard whispers of long before it came to fruition. Needless to say, the promise of table-top tangos in University College’s Great Hall, knife fights, musical interludes and fistfuls of polaroids flung at the audience piqued my curiosity.
So, early that day, I’d sat in on one of the cast’s rehearsals to get a sense of what exactly I was going to be in for. They had the Hall from brunch until curtain, and it was difficult to imagine that the space, a sort of hungover Mecca for weekend-warriors in need of a hot meal, would be Venice by 8pm. As the cast began to run their lines, admire their own promotional posters, and the gentle Spanish guitar (played by Imran Omerdeen) picked up, I watched the remains of half-eaten croissants or full Englishes be cleared away to make room for the massacre to come.
When I did take my seat, the Hall was dimly lit. Its benches were arranged in a long elliptical shape around a central table on which the actors would perform. The back half of the hall was obscured by large partitions, behind which the tech team sat hidden away. When I’d asked Zhang earlier what had prompted her to stage the play in such a novel space, she told me that the Hall “lets us decide where the audience seating goes – it allows us to control and manipulate the distance between audience and performance. The idea is that we seat the audience almost at an uncomfortable closeness”. By the time Act Five rolled around, and I was flinching away from Cassio’s (Lara Machado) knife, I knew exactly what she meant.
The play begins with an ominous sort of dance sequence – the lights flash, the cast move strangely, and Othello (Fitzroy Pablo Wickham) and Desdemona (Natasha Hermer) cradle one another gently on the central table. Their chemistry is immediately convincing, impressive given no lines have yet been spoken. All exeunt, and then on staggers Rodrigo (Caitlin McAnespy) in pitiable paroxysms of unrequited love. Zhang’s vision has altered Roderigo a little, from the text’s vaguely irritating incel into a far more sympathetic idiot. McAnespy realises this excellently, offering little ad-libbed asides to the audience, and a drunken burlesque to The Kiss of Fire, which she sings herself to wonderful effect.
Wickham as Othello was a powerhouse. After murdering Desdemona, he wanders upstage – dialogue is exchanged but I couldn’t look anywhere but at Wickham, alternating the rolling eyes of a man driven to distraction by grief, and the look of one half in a dream. Throughout the play he commands each of his scenes with a deeply authoritative presence. The ethereal Hermer, in her long white dress, floats alongside and does a remarkable job of imbuing Desdemona with an actual sense of personality (something the Bard might have forgotten to do.) Her death rattle, when being strangled, is particularly impressive. Within the cast, there were a few issues with line reads, though I would challenge anyone in student drama to read thousands of lines perfectly while having to jump on and off a table at least once a scene.
Zhang described to me how, after a summer of turbulent relationships herself, Othello has been a sort of “life raft”. As she described to me the vision behind the deliberately un-militaristic costuming (white shirts and dress trousers, generally, though each with the character’s own spin on it), the staging, the dancing, and how “proud” she was of the cast, I got a real sense that this play is, in many ways, her baby. And, for a first time director, it’s a pretty precocious baby. Her vision was meticulous and, I would say, impressively well actualised.
The stand-out scenes for me were the tangos – each of the play’s core couples were given a tango sequence, each characterised to fit their relationship. Cassio and Bianca’s (Caeli Colgan) dance reflected new-found romance, while Othello and Desdemona’s was a slow and loving affair, with an ever-so-slightly threatening edge. My personal favourite was Iago (Leah Selimic) and Emilia (Scarlett Fountain-Wilkinson). Fountain-Wilkinson stamped down the central table in a pair of Docs that landed on each beat, in a feverishly aggressive dance that saw the couple’s deep contempt for each other made fantastically visual. Their pairing was an excellent one – an earlier scene sees Selimic embrace Fountain-Wilkinson by the neck and shoulders from behind, a position they resume in the final scene when she is murdered. Their mutual hatred in the play’s denouement is delicious, and the fact that – at no point – did anyone plunge off the edge of the narrow table is testament to the stage management.
It is at this point I have to offer a great deal of credit to Othello’s tech team – Kai Wray on light design, and Caitlin Hawthorn on sound. The thematic lighting – blue for Iago’s soliloquies-turned-dream-sequences, or red for the Iago-Emilia tango, with the most effective blackouts I’ve ever seen in student theatre – was well coordinated. The whispered chants, backing music, and the live cheers of the tech team during the party sequence to give the sense of greater numbers worked well in the echoing space. When I asked Wray if the Hall had presented any particular challenges, they’d remarked that ‘the worst part is putting lights in places where actors don’t kick them, and not killing an actor, which would be bad.’
A few prop issues provided minor levity to an otherwise appalling tragedy; when the polaroids thrown around were swept up, the head fell off one of the brooms and a few stray torches disrupted the black-outs. The strawberry handkerchief, after becoming lost in the lining of Cassio’s coat, was replaced for one scene by a tissue. If anything, the rapid course-correction was commendable. The play is wildly ambitious in what it attempts to do, demanding its actors remember intricate dancing and fight choreography while navigating a space not intended to house drama. The benches in Univ Hall also demand of the audience a strong constitution and no pre-existing spine conditions – at times it was difficult to shake the feeling of being seated for a school assembly. I’d recommend arriving earlier than I did, in order to secure yourself a chair with back support.
Othello has sold out on all nights. There is, I believe, a waiting list. This term so far seems to be one of deeply ambitious OUDS undertakings – accordingly, some things go very right, others wrong. I am, however, heartened to see it; the zealous sort of lunacy that powers the very best of Oxford Drama has not died. It is alive and well in Univ Hall, Saturday 9th to Tuesday 12th November.
Poster credit: Arrant Thief Productions
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