With Toby Jones in the role of Shakespeare’s most reviled villain, they could have called this starry revival Iago. Opposite an imperious David Harewood in the title role, Jones’s adjutant to Othello is a relentlessly malignant presence.
Dressed in modern, British soldier army fatigues, Jones’s Iago is like a virus in human form. He poisons all the minds that his strain of deliberate misinformation can infect. In that sense the mystery of what motivates Iago in his mission to destroy the lives of his trusting commander and his elegant wife Desdemona (Caitlin Fitzgerald) is solved. Iago is born to serve but he exists to destroy.
Tom Morris’s production feels suspended in nowhere in particular and certainly not Venice. But it barrels along at a thriller’s pace.
Harewood is in complete command of the powerful, imposing Othello’s descent into dishevelled distraction. The sense of being virally infected by his right-hand man climaxes when he keels over stiff as board in a literal fit of jealousy at the fake news that his wife is being unfaithful with Luke Treadaway’s guileless Cassio.
