The Globe is my Tiffany's

Except I never eat breakfast there, because the shows are all in the afternoon and evening.

I was only in London for one night, but of course I have obligations for my one evening. I got very lucky, too -- totally sold out, and a long line for returns, but I scored my standing ticket at the very last minute, and that made it even better.

The play was Othello, not my favorite for a variety of reasons, and sadly this performance didn't really change my mind. I always get the feeling that in order to write Othello, Shakespeare took the two main character traits of Aaron, from Titus, and split them into two characters and wrote a play about those two. Othello got the dark skin and the resentment implied therein, and Iago got the evil and cunning and whatnot. And you know, there's nothing wrong with that, work with what you know and all, but the way the show ended up, it's really intensely difficult to do.

Because, right, Othello has to do this complete 180 degree turnaround, and the catch is he really doesn't get very much time to do it in, and he doesn't get very much provocation. So you need to foreshadow fairly, because otherwise it's racist (the idea that a black guy can just change from good to evil at the drop of a hat), not to mention the audience is just lost, but if you foreshadow too much, it's still racist (even the black guys that act the best are really only wearing a thin covering of 'civilization' and they can throw it off at any time). Now you could argue that this just makes it a racist play, and in certain ways that's true -- it doesn't have Merchant of Venice's saving grace of the whole if-you-prick-us speech. But I've been thinking about that, and I don't think you HAVE to play it racist -- as long as you give Othello subtle but concrete emotions behind his actions.

Because the story makes perfect sense if Othello IS very civilized (I hate that word but can't think of a better one in this context) but people have been being racist against him all his life, literally everyone EXCEPT Desdemona. And so he's come to expect it, and he's very on guard against it, and he's very paranoid about it, and all that is feeding him all the time. And then, really, all he would NEED to do is hear something about how Desdemona doesn't really love him or is just like everyone else, and his world really WOULD collapse, and it would lead to him questioning himself, even possibly without realizing it. Does that make sense? As in, he's so used to hearing that he's a barbarian, and he spends his whole life trying to be as much like the people around him as he possibly can, to draw attention away from it, and naturally he's intensely sensitive on this point but of course he can't possibly SHOW that, because then people would flip out more. And he finally meets someone who loves him for himself (that's the whole point, isn't it, she loves him for the stories that he tells her about his life) and he feels like he can relax and let his guard down in front of her, and she really cares about him, and finally he seems to have won something and fit in, etc. And then he lets his guard down enough to trust her, but SINCE he's still really sensitve about the whole thing, it WOULDN'T take much for Iago to play on that sensitivity in the form of jealousy. And Iago would have to play it like jealousy, because Othello is so used to comments about his race -- he withstands them just fine from Desdemona's father at the very start of the play -- but the jealousy would tie in nicely with the fears he already has. And from there, it's not really a very far leap for Othello to be like, you know what, fuck you ALL, and quit acting the 'civilized' person for their benefit, and be so angry and hurt, and in back of all that really questioning his own self worth -- CAN anyone love me, AM I not a good person, IS it because of something I can't change -- and let all that swing him too far the other direction, right into wife-murder-in-her-bed territory.

And I really don't think that's racist, in fact, I think it's kind of anti-racist, showing the ways that racism can drive the most normal people into hideous things -- because racism helps drive Iago, as well.

Right, so the performance. I had the same problem with this show that I had with Titus last fall -- namely, they didn't get my interpretation across. Heh. Okay, I'm sort of kidding. What I mean is that in both cases, I felt like the play lacked subtlety. I thought the acting was good, I thought the energy was on target, the cast worked well together, etc., etc., but in both cases everything else was so very good that it threw into sharp relief for me the lack of subtlety when it came to why these people were doing the crazy things they were doing. I thought the 'clicker' scene in Titus -- the turning point scene, I mean, the one where he laughs -- was glossed over and we as the audience didn't get to see why he was laughing, that the elements didn't build, that the play stayed on one level instead of building and crescendoing like a piece of music. Okay, what I know about music fills maybe a teaspoon, but that's the analogy that makes sense to me. And that should come from the characters as written; you're telling a story about people, and it gets so much more powerful when you see exactly why everyone's doing everything, because then you get all creeped out about your own personality, which in my view is kind of the goal of good theater, especially good tragic theater. Which maybe tells you something about me.

And it's hard for me to critique that stuff, because both after Titus and after Othello, my own interpretation became really clear to me, so I think in both cases it's entirely possible that they're doing it on purpose, so that people's ideas about the play become clear to them. Mine only became clear after a lot of thought, but I was influenced enough by the play to take that thought, so maybe this is the best kind of theater there is, much as I might prefer the kind that presents such a clear interpretation and such clear motivations that you feel part of the story, and you question your character afterwards and all that. (And I know that kind of theater is possible, it's just insanely-beyond-all-reason difficult. But that was Romeo and Juliet a few years ago, and Richard II the year before that; I don't know who that guy is but I kind of want to kiss his feet and then stalk him.)

And this is why philosophy majors should not be interested in doing practical theater. Right here, case in point.

All that aside, I still felt this production was too choppy, something about it hadn't quite gelled yet, but it is only the third performance, so possibly that's coming. Iago was excellent; so were Roderigo and Desdemona. Wasn't a fan of the guy playing Othello, but that was entirely because of what I was talking about before. There were some very nice touches, like having him dress in Shakespearean attire until the day he's going to kill Desdemona, and then dressing him in Arabian robes. (See, you see what I mean? And I didn't even think about that until just now, practically, yet it obviously and clearly influenced my own interpretation of the play, and now I'm like, oh, so that's why they did that.)

Also, I made it up to Durham, I'm staying with my university friends, and am having a very good time seeing the sights and talking Johnny.