And I will kill thee and love thee after

And having missed their Midsummer Night's Dream in January, nineweaving and I went tonight to see the Actors' Shakespeare Project's Othello. If it was not as objectively devastating as the last production I saw (Willard White, Ian McKellen, Imogen Stubbs, directed by Trevor Nunn in 1990; I watched the DVD last October and excrucior), it was very, very good. Unaccountably I had never heard of Ken Cheeseman, whom I will actively follow in future; in field boots and a battered flight jacket, he makes a sandy, rangy Iago, sweet-talking and scoffing from his blue-eyed coyote's face; he convinces as his comrades' "honest Iago" in part because it seems paranoid to suspect anyone so loudmouthed and physically lively—and unsparing in his sarcasm—of the stealthy hatreds and stratagems that his name is a byword for. Even in soliloquy, he is never sinister, except perhaps for the admiration with which he pronounces, as if naming himself, Divinity of hell! But when he takes center stage, the wires that track from various points of the set all converge on him, at the heart of the web. He catches the spotlight and hurls it across the audience, playing with our attention as he will grandmaster the other characters to their downfall. And he is visibly the elder of Jason Bowen's Othello, an old campaigner who has been vaulted by the meteoric Moor and then his lieutenant Cassio; whatever rationale he tips to the audience or throws out to his dupe Roderigo or refuses to offer to his judges in the end, we might as well believe it a kind of boredom, the exercise and proof of his soldier's skill. He too can plan and carry off as shattering a victory as his general's over the Turks. Wounded, threatened with torture, with no more rue or resentment than before, he laughs: Demand me nothing: what you know, you know. I'd cast him as Snorri Sturluson's Loki.

For the rest of the cast, I appreciated very much that Brooke Hardman's Desdemona was neither a sacrificial victim nor a child-bride china doll; she is chaste and true, but neither of those qualities annuls her passion, her playfulness, and the strength of mind with which she fights for her love and her life, even in the shock of murderous jealousy. (Nor was she fair-haired, which made a nice change from the traditional contrast.) As Cassio, Michael Forden Walker showed off the ambiguities in his clean-cut lieutenant with a drunk scene that shifted from comical to violent in two shots of vodka and a sequence of meetings with Bianca, passionate twinings after which he carefully blots off his lover's lipstick, containing himself back into his reputation again. Paula Langton simply rocked as Emilia: seen first for a single scene as the casually confident Duke of Venice, she plays thereafter a woman terribly without power, still hoping against years of evidence otherwise that the proper obedience, service, support will return her abusive husband's love to her, as once she must have known it to speak so bitterly of men's inconstancy. Her exposure of his double-dealing is at once the healthiest and the most fatal decision she could make, and this production does not smooth over the fact that while Othello's murder of his wife is a crime of passion, Iago's is a split-second calculation to save his own skin. Which brings me to Othello, without whom all the Desdemonas and Iagos from Stratford to Singapore will not make a production: I think what I liked best about Bowen was (ironically, because it made the later scenes so much more difficult to watch) the quiet sunniness with we first observe him interacting with his wife, his ancient, his lieutenant, his men, which is not the same as naïveté. He is, genuinely, by nature not a jealous man; coveting no one else's position, he has no radar for the behavior in others. And yet the violence he offers Iago for slandering his wife's name is the same violence he will work upon her, obverse-reverse; we are all coins that can be turned to show one face or the other, or both at once as we spin. The set reflected this, in light and dark puzzle pieces that I would swear changed between scenes. Nor I neither by this heavenly light—I might do't as well i' the dark.

I think there are three shows left before the production closes; I'd catch one if I were you. In the meantime, since I have to get up at ridiculous o'clock, I'm going to sleep.