Robert Tanitch reviews ENO’s Otello at London Coliseum, WC2.
Seeing Verdi’s Otello for the first time was a major turning-point in my theatre-going life. Up till then, going to the opera was not something I had done very often. I suddenly realized what I had been missing and knew I had a lot of catching up to do. In the next two years I saw as many operas as I could. I quickly learned that some of the best theatre was to be found in opera houses.
Verdi takes the characters as seriously as Shakespeare does; and Acts 11 and 111 are as exciting as they are in Shakespeare. There are great moments, such as when Iago (Jonathan Summers) sings his credo, “I believe in a cruel God”, and when he and Otello (Stuart Skelton) swear allegiance at the end of the great temptation scene.
The sheer numbers that ENO can field on stage is a tremendous help during the storm which opens the opera and in the scene when Otello humiliates Desdemona (Leah Crocetto) in front of the Doge’s envoy. The humiliation is all the greater for being so very public. Verdi (conducted by Edward Gardner) is absolutely thrilling.
We live an age when it is no longer acceptable for white actors to black up to play black parts; which means that were Laurence Olivier alive today he would not be able to perform Shakespeare’s Othello, one of his greatest roles.
How does ENO solve the problem when they cast Stuart Skelton in the most famous black role of all time? Casting in opera has been colour blind for a very long time. Singers are cast because of their voices.
Skelton does not black up. He plays Otello as a white man. There is nothing in either his make-up or dress to suggest that Otello is a Moor. A key element of the drama is undeniably missing. Skelton, who sings magnificently, is never Shakespeare’s Othello; he’s the sort of big, burly, epileptic, working-class bloke you might find in an Italian neo-realist post-World War 2 film.
The jealousy, the green eyed monster, still comes across with extraordinary power in David Alden’s production. A major disappoointment is that there is no bed for Desdemona to be murdered on in the final scene; not even a second best bed. Crochetto dies in the street, in the gutter, which is not right at all.
I have always thought the drunken Cassio to be the very last person the Doge should have made governor of Cyprus and never more so than here when he is being very immature and throwing darts at an icon of the Virgin Mary and, wait for it, hitting a bulls-eye.
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