Bard’s tragedy staged with wit and skill

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 30/05/2009 (5945 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Casting an aboriginal actor in the role of the tragically deceived black man in a Prairie production of Othello is an appropriate, if obvious, conceit.

But Shakespeare in the Ruins’ clever and often witty version, staged in a tent outside the Assiniboine Park Conservatory and starring Cree actor Michael Lawrenchuk as the Moor of Venice, finds a second one.

The play begins, if you can believe it, at the end. Director Christopher Brauer, a theatre prof at the University of Winnipeg, has taken a few lines from the doomed hero’s last soliloquy in the final act, and staged them off the top.

The innocent Desdemona has already met her unjust fate. Othello, who “has loved not wisely but too well,” exits the way of so many Shakespearean heroes.

But this time, he comes back! A ghost from beyond, he watches silently from the edge of the stage as the villainous Iago unfurls his treachery against him from the play’s actual beginning.

What is the point of this theatrical change-up? Perhaps it’s Brauer’s method of paying respect to the notion of the aboriginal spirit world.

Or it could be a way to add depth to a character who, to modern sensibilities, is the most under-written of Shakespearean heroes.

In any event, Lawrenchuk acquits himself admirably in his tough task. He moves gracefully, speaking softly and deliberately — with no attempt to cover his northern Manitoba accent — except when projecting Othello’s jealous rages.

Sometimes he seems too sensitive for a warrior chief. But this is problem any actor will have in a role that calls for him to be both a canny general and an easily duped naif.

Stocky and round of face, Lawrenchuk stands in visual opposition to veteran SIR actor Arne MacPherson as Iago. Tall, stringy and angular, he exudes evil as the schemer whose duplicity the early 19th-century poet Coleridge called “the motive hunting of motiveless malignancy.”

That’s one way to describe a vicious office politicker. The scholarly consensus is that Iago’s hatred for his boss stems from his being passed over for promotion, and MacPherson makes that clear.

But he also relishes the Bard’s lines that suggest, on no evidence, sexual resentment, that Othello “twixt my sheets has done my office.”

Another Winnipeg veteran thespian, Sarah Constible, gives the virtuous Desdemona a refreshing maturity. You can believe her feelings for her husband go beyond a girlish crush.

Andrew Cecon makes a suitably foppish Roderigo and Kevin Klassen a dutiful Cassio. Of the many supporting roles, all by regulars in the SIR stable, Michelle Boulet stands out as Iago’s knowing wife Emilia.

Despite its casting nod to the Canadian prairie, the production’s actual setting is unclear, a kind of any time, any place.

Brenda McLean costumes Othello and Cassio in leather biker garb, Iago in a long black leather coat, and the others in an odd mixture that suggests everything from a medieval court to a Jazz Age hotel. All that’s missing is someone in a Star Trek tunic.

David Hewlett’s set design emphasizes black, reds and whites. He aligns the largely bare stage on a north-south axis, with the audience in three long rows of lawn chairs facing east and looking out onto a sloping terrace behind the tent, from which the actors enter and exit from a distance.

Hewlett has also installed a small rectangular pool, with a foot of real water, at stage centre-rear, where Desdemona bathes her legs and Iago suffers a head dunking. Pray for them that the weather warms up.

For whatever reason, Othello does not get staged often in Winnipeg. This is a first for SIR in its 15 years, and Manitoba Theatre Centre has not done it in 51.

That alone makes this one worth experiencing, and it has many other virtues to recommend it as well.

morley.walker@freepress.mb.ca

Theatre Review

Othello

Shakespeare in the Ruins

Assiniboine Park Conservatory

May 28-June 20

Four stars out of five

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