Court’s biggest: 'Othello’ in red and white

Press, 13 June 1978, Page 18

Court’s biggest: 'Othello’ in red and white

The Court Theatre will mount one of its most ambitious and expensive productions on Saturday, when it Opens, for a season of just over a month, Shakespeare’s great tragedy, “Othello.” The production, which has been in rehearsal for some time, is being, directed by Elric Hooper, who has also designed the sets.

“Othello,” the story of a love that ends in despair and death, is set in Venice and Cyprus, and Mr Hooper has based his set on the architecture of the Palazzo Dario in Venice, built in 1487.

“Its style is that of the classical Renaissance, but its decoration has exotic

overtones that would make it as suitable for colonial Cyprus as for the Metropolis itself,” he said. Mr Hooper has worked not only on the production and the set, but also on the costumes, in conjunction with the Court’s costume designer, Pamela Maling. They have taken the paintings of Titian as their starting point, and words from the text — marble, alabaster, snow, strawberry, and blood 7— as their cues, and have enclosed Othello and his world in deep Venetian reds and white. After all, says Mr Hooper, this tragedy is one of sunshine, and the Mediterranean night.

He adds: “It is perhaps no accident that of the six greatest tragedies of Shakespeare, ‘Hamlet,’ ‘King Lear,’ ‘Macbeth,’ ‘Othello,’ ‘Antony and Cleopatra,’ and ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ the last three, the ‘love tragedies,’ are set in the sunlight of the Mediterranean, wheras the tragedies of power and man’s encounter with the cosmos are set in the misty regions of the north, in Denmark, Ancient Britain, and Scotland. In the ‘love tragedies’ the air is warm and clear. There are no supernatural elements and the outlines are bold and human.

“ ‘Othello,’ is not a play like ‘Hamlet,’ ‘King Lear,’

or ‘Macbeth’ that lends itself to great cosmological or pseudo-theological speculations. It is its painful self. Its mysteries are those of man, and the brutal and wonderful workings of the human heart. It is perhaps this that makes it the most approachable of all the tragedies; the most contemporary.

“The spectator who does not want to rise from his seat to intervene in this situation that could so easily be put to rights, who does not feel hopeless helpessness as these two magnificent creatures go to their ruin, has no heart. He is with lago.”