Varieties of Theatrical Interpretation, 1943–82

Abstract

This ‘most passionately human of all Shakespeare’s plays’ (so Michéal MacLiammóir, the Iago to Orson Welles’s Othello [Observer, 12 April 1959]) demands in performance an articulation of its emotional line that is at every moment convincing to an audience if it is to believe in the onrush of Othello’s jealousy and to be moved by his terrible misjudgement. The great speeches must come through as passion felt, not as an actor’s calculated response to the lines. The failure to clarify the play’s emotional movement in performance plagues modern productions, about which one reads over and over again in reviews that they suffer from ‘lack of clarity’ or that they lack ‘any guiding principle’.