As William Shakespeare turned 400 last week, Sir Laurence Olivier was only a month shy of becoming 57. Neither man had aged much. And the younger one proved it by stunning all London with a performance of Othello that was a greater gift to the poet than all the monuments that could be raised in a memorial year. It is Olivier's first Othello. And it will probably be called the definitive one for decades to come.
Olivier had always avoided Othello because he did not think he had the voice for it; also he considers it an all but unplayable part. He imagines Shakespeare having a drink with the great actor Richard Burbage and becoming fed to the teeth with Burbage's bragging that he could play any role at all. "I'll fix you," says Olivier's Shakespeare, who goes home to write Othello.
Getting ready for the try, Olivier boomed and bellowed at the rehearsal hall's rafters until he had amplified his "rib reserve." He soaked himself in potassium permanganate, but that failed to darken him sufficiently, so he settled in the end for coal-black grease paint. He tightened the spring in his stride, explaining, "Othello should walk like a soft black panther." He practiced the curiously accented, oddly stressed speech that evoked the way some Jamaicans and Africans gush English, managing thereby to convey the way the Moor spoke Italian.
Olivier saw Othello as a man not blind to lago's ambitions but only to his stratagems, realizing them too late. Interpretation, however, was only the door to his triumph, which reached its height in the Moor's eruption of jealousy and murderous violence. Said the Financial Times's Alan Dent: "He is like a lion caught in a cruel trap." In the Daily Mail, the often appreciation-proof Bernard Levin said that "Sir Laurence's Othello is larger than life, bloodier than death, more piteous than pity.
He is stupendous. On or off stage, I have never seen such torment as his jealousy puts him in—it is as though a wild beast has been sewn up inside him and is clawing to get out. His whole body writhes and flails, out of control—not the reeling and grimacing that often passes for passion, but the real thing, directed from within. He kills with such sorrow that it is unbearable. He is a very great actor, indeed."