The Colorado Shakespeare Festival--1970

Abstract

HE acting company for the Thirteenth Annual Colorado Shakespeare Festival (3I July-i6 August) was probably the Go strongest in its history, and the result was record attendance and excellent performance. I have never seen a better Othello than this directed by A d d Albert H. Nadeau. Such extravagance is afforded by a revelation which this production granted me. I have contemplated Othello as an exotic, a stranger, a pantaloon, a victim, a fool (Men should be what they seem), a black hero in a white melodrama, a sun-tanned Walter Huston, a liver-lipped Laurence Olivier, a magnificently bullish Paul Robeson, and as a second-rate hero among A. C. Bradley's big four. But I was not prepared for the pagan gentility, the curtailed then unleashed barbarousness of Sidney Hibbert's Othello. Here is an actor who is devoted to the detail of character construction-the construction from modest story-telling (Her father lov'd me, oft invited me;/ Still questioned me the story of my life), through quiet authority, through steely authority (Hold for your lives!), through laughing security (O misery!), through rational security (I'll see before I doubt), through genuine dilemma, through a disintegration of personality which commands the trance (the most real I have seen), through hellish whorehouses of the mind, through putting out the light, and to an eloquently cathartic Soft you; a word or two before you go. And Iago? Is he the personification of evil, or is he a well (or ill)-motivated jealous rival to Cassio or Othello or anyone else? Neither. Henry Hoffman's Iago was as unique as Hibbert's Othello. Hoffman began by assuring us that it is all good fun, that he is the coy-boy, the puppet-master. As such he played for laughs with sure technique. And he managed the usual Iago triumph in the temptation scenes. But something went sour in his imagination and he conveyed this marvelously in the last disordered scene (the only unfocused scene in the production) and his muteness became a triumph, not of evil but of almost tragic self-consciousness. Ivar Brogger as Roderigo was a superb Venetian jock-strap; his absurd innocence was apparent-no namby pamby, just dumb desire. Cassio, as played by Scott Porter, was exactly handsome, exactly remorseful, and exactly right. James Edmondson played Brabantio with such an interesting dignity (far beyond the pantaloon) that a friend seated next to me said that the character was too interesting to disappear so early in the play. Heather MacDonald, speaking lines assigned to the Clown, brightened the distaff side of the cast. Desdemona (Mary Ed Porter) as pure good must be sacrificed (as character and as actress) to a play which concentrates on evil.