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Though the run of this production had been sold out for a while, on the night I attended about thirty percent of the auditorium was empty. This particular performance took place on March 22, just a few hours after a 4x4 vehicle, driven by English-born Khalid Masood, mounted the pavement of Westminster Bridge and mowed down dozens of pedestrians, before Masood jumped out and fatally stabbed a police officer. The final death toll (including the terrorist who was killed by armed police) was six and thirty-one people were hospitalized, many of whom have sustained "life-changing" injuries.
Othello is a play about, among other things, the murderous effects of hatred. The fact that many in the audience had chosen to stay away illustrates the pervasiveness of the anxieties caused by this kind of contemporary terrorism. But it also illustrates the lamentable failure of human beings to have evolved in the last four hundred years. If, as the liberal humanists tell us, Shakespeare's depictions of love, generosity, and altruism are for all time, so are his portrayals of rage, jealousy and hatred. Shakespeare's glass cannot be half full without its being-at the same time-half empty.
As Ellen McDougall (director) and Joel Horwood (dramaturg) put it in their program note, "it is impossible to put this play on without recognising that 400 years later, the problems of Shakespeare's Othello are still very much part of our world." If one accepts that this is a truth if not universally then at least partially acknowledged, why would one foist onto the text a series of modish, unsympathetic and, in places, downright obtrusive updatings? If, as McDougall and Horwood insist, the play is as much with us as its original textual incarnation, surely it can speak for itself.
The experience of watching this production was, at particular moments, to be suddenly expelled from its fictional world by a moment of textual vandalism that ruptured any sense of narrative coherence and dashed the attempt to suspend disbelief. McDougall and Horwood justified their interpolations as follows: "By updating certain words, we want to honour the 'shock value' of Shakespeare's original work." Nothing wrong with updating to render the text more...