Olivia and I decamped at the interval due to heat, impending murders, and in deference to her desire to see the big city after being cooped up in Stratford all week. So my thoughts of the Globe’s Othello end with 3.3, perhaps the most brutal and brilliant scene Shakespeare ever wrote, which takes the Moor from happy husband to sworn homicide. I would have liked to have seen the close, but I know how it ends!

One thing I love about the Globe in London is the differences among the various seats. Seeing Othello on the first week of Mark Rylance’s return to the Globe as Iago meant we were up in the corner of the second balcony, looking often enough down at the bald spot on Rylance’s head and missing “I am not that I am” (1.1) entirely because he was standing behind one of the on-stage columns at that point. But we had a great view of the upper stage, and we weren’t roasting in the yard, nor at risk of being run down by either of two  fantastically bulky boat-wagons, complete with masts and sails, on which first Iago and Desdemona and later Othello made ship-born entrances to Cyprus in 2.1. I usually love standing at the Globe, but it wan’t bad to be under cover in the blazing heat.

(I wonder if the sudden downpour that caught Olivia and me on our way back to Southwark might have caught the play not yet finished. What would torrential rain do to Othello’s putting out the light?)

Andre Holland and Mark Rylance

We rushed down from Stratford so I could see Rylance’s Iago, and I was intrigued by his performance. Two decades older than Andre Holland’s dashing Othello, Rylance’s Iago emphasized service and humility — though the audience hissed back at him when he protested, “what’s he that says I play the villain?” (2.3). Rylance played the audience expertly, and especially in the long & doom-laden 3.3, his patient construction of Iago’s false reluctance — his echoes, negations, leaving the stage and then returning to it — built into devastating power. I’ve always felt that the line with which Iago closes 3.3 — “I am your own forever,” he says to his general — carries the full weight of all the broken lives to come. In Rylance’s delivery, the ominous force of that line deepened and made palpable the slow, at times delicate, always careful, even fragile, playing that grew up into the over declaration.

Andre Holland was one of the most winning Othello’s I’ve half-seen. In particular in the long speech about his adventures with the Anthropophagi and the men whose heads grow beneath their shoulders (1.3), he played the crowd as expertly as Rylance’s Iago. I wondered about whether Holland was too beautiful to be fearsome in his murderous guise — maybe some later reviews will answer that for me — but I loved his charisma and open-ness, which things, of course, make him vulnerable to Iago.

I thought quite a bit, perhaps in a slightly political way, about youth being preyed upon by age: Steffan Donnelley’s Roderigo, like Holland’s Othello and also Aaron Pierre’s Cassio, were so much younger that they seemed to depend on Iago as the voice of experience. Like the youth of 2018, these figures are poorly served by their elders. Both Cassio and Roderigo may well be young, depending on casting, but in the text the Moor starts to complain about having “declined / Into the vale of years” (3.3), before admitted “but that’s not much” (3.3). I loved what I saw of Holland’s Othello, and I wonder how he transformed himself into the irrational madman of act 4 and the focused killer of 5.1.

The other performance that I feel I can’t well judge based on the first half only is Jessica Warbeck’s Desdemona. Before she recognized her husband’s jealousy and got thrown into a tragedy, Desdemona presented herself as a very successful comic heroine, choosing her husband, avoiding her angry father, even talking her way through the Doge’s desire to employ her husband on his wedding night. I liked Warbeck’s performance, but again I wonder what happened with it when everything shatters.

I’ll not get to see that second half this summer, I’m afraid, since we go home on Sunday — but there’s always GlobeTV!

Joan Iyiola as the Duchess of Malfi

The non-Shakespearean plays are always the highlights. I don’t know if it’s that the RSC feels constrained by its status as the official company performing the national playwright, but the Shakespeare can feel cramped, at times awkward, and always over-familiar. But even a fairly often-played also-ran like John Webster’s bloody Jacobean tragedy The Duchess of Malfi has a freshness to it — not to mention the bizarre charm of some over-the-top stage business in the second act that involved pouring out a great pool of wild boar-or-bull’s blood onto the stage, in which expanding puddle every cast member splashed, slipped, and nearly drowned. Metaphors, anyone?

Joan Iyiola’s performance as the Duchess earned her ovation at night’s end with a thrilling, physical, charismatic performance that included glorious singing after (she thinks) her husband and son have been murdered by her evil brother. I could not tell what she was singing — Catholic chants would have been period appropriate, or African laments would express the implicit multiculturalism in the RSC casting. Iyiola anchored the production, and after her death in act 4 the men in her orbit — her non-aristocratic husband, the two brothers from whom she concealed the marriage, and the clever but duplicitous servant Bosola — tore themselves to pieces without her.

In one of the particular pleasures of Stratford, I bumped into Iyiola after the show at the Dirty Duck pub and was able to tell her how much I enjoyed her work. She seemed smaller out of costume.

The Twins (Joan Iyiola as the Duchess and Alexander Cobb as Ferdinand)

The other blazing performance in the show was Alexander Cobb in his RSC debut as Ferdinand, the Duchess’s twin and nemesis. In some ways I thought his performance the most powerful of the night, and his ability to match the Duchess was the core of the show’s success. His rage at his sister’s remarriage seemed inexplicable until, staring at her blood-soaked corpse on the low bed that was the main feature of the stage, he admitted to being her twin and bound to her for life. The play didn’t over-emphasize the Freudian incest theme — Webster’s play makes such psychological explanations seem both too pat and radically insufficient for the horrors on stage — but in that moment, especially, Cobb found a painfully human feeling inside the ultra-villainous brother. I look forward to seeing him in other roles!

The cast was universally strong, especially Chris New as the Duchess’s other brother, a sexually predatory Cardinal, and Nicholas Tennant as Bosola, who ultimately kills the Duchess’s husband in error and then dies last at the show’s messy conclusion. The male chorus, who alternately perform as a gathering of madmen outside the Duchess’s window and an assault team, were also engaging dancers.

It’s hard to know what to make of Webster’s painful anatomy of human self-destruction. The attack on toxic masculinity seems almost too obvious, not to mention undercut by the obvious pleasure the play (and audience) take in the super-violence. There’s a dark misanthropic core to this play, and in some other Jacobean tragedies, perhaps including Shakespeare’s. But the pleasure of this lucid production includes both the Duchess’s doomed bid for female independence amid patriarchal horror and the converse terrors of being caught inside that doomed world when you think, wrongly, that you may be in control of it.

Off to London today!

The moment when Christopher Eccleston’s open and engaging Macbeth most powerfully connected to Niamh Cusak’s fierce and powerful Lady Macbeth came with his most direct reference to the child this production assumes they had together and lost:

Bring forth men-children only!

For thy undaunted mettle should compose

Nothing but males! (1.7)

At that line, Lady Macbeth shatters, and her head falls into her husband’s chest. For a second, it’s possible to glimpse the marriage that once stood behind these “dearest partner[s] in greatness” (15). It was a welcome view into that emotional core in a production in which the two lead roles were powerfully played but mostly in parallel to each other. I tend to like Macbeth productions that emphasize the marriage bond early, so that part of the play’s tragedy lies in its dissolution. (The best example I’ve seen was by Cheek by Jowl in 2013.)

Eccleston’s performance of the tyrant emphasized physical power and charisma. He did a great job reaching all sides of the RSC theater, and often conveyed a gruff charisma that seemed most appropriate when, in the first and last acts, he wore a (modern) soldier’s costume. He started the early speech “If it ’twere done, when ’tis done…” (1.7) too fast, but he fell into compelling rhythm as he paced through the lines. The only big speech that he seemed to scant was, oddly, the familiar cadences of “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” (5.5), though whether he was simply playing Macbeth’s own exhaustion or the progression alienation of the central couple from each other left no force behind “She should have died hereafter” (5.5) was hard to tell.

Cusak’s Lady Macbeth showed her strength in evening gowns and high heels, in particular when she held together the party of nobles while he husband gaped at Baquo’s ghost (3.4). In the moment of her highest melodrama — “Unsex me here” (1.5) and “I have given suck” (1.7) — she acquired a kind of stately authority in extremity, so that Macbeth’s “men-children only” seemed to be a counter-blow in response to her overwhelming attack. I thought about the meddle/metal and male/mail resonances as he spoke his lines: did he want his wife to be made of steel, or does he fear that the lost child has made her steely? What lasting monument does the doomed couple really want? I though also about the other play the RSC is doing this summer, Romeo and Juliet, in which the two lovers end up as dead statues. Something in love wants to freeze people into art?

Beyond the two strong if perhaps not entirely connected performances at the center, this production distinguished itself in several high-concept ways. A trio of very young girls played the Weird Sisters, who appeared much more often than the few scenes they have in the play and in fact presided over the final scene. Dressed in pink pajamas and sometimes carrying dolls, the girls carried the desired creepy horror-movie vibe.

The Porter, played by Michael Hodgson, also stayed on stage for nearly the entire show, keeping a chalk tally of the body count and setting a countdown clock to 2:00 at the death of Duncan than hit 0:00 exactly as Macbeth gave his final “enough” and fell anti-climactically to Macduff’s sword at the play’s end. In a cyclical gambit that’s now somewhat familiar, the clock started again for the final tableau, as Banquo’s son Fleance appeared ready to challenge Luke Newberry’s boyish Malcolm for the throne.

The other standout performance was Raphael Sowole as Banquo, who nicely combined tenderness toward his son with a soldier’s bearing. During the banquet scene, Macbeth several times appeared to be afraid of empty air, but when Banquo’s ghost at last appeared, face covered in blood, Sowole managed, despite how many times I’ve seen this play, to be shocking. Sowole, another debut actor for this RSC season, also played Tybalt in Romeo and Juliet, who appeared as an extra-textual ghost late in that play. I saw Sowole at the pub after the show last night, and almost asked him how the double ghosting brought together the two doomed soldiers. But it was late, and I didn’t want to bug the performers.

Duchess of Malfi tonight!

Bally Gil as Romeo and Karen Fishwick as Juliet

The two best performances of the night were by the pros Ishia Bennison as the Nurse and Andrew French as Friar Laurence. Bennison combined humor with deep emotional connection, especially to Juliet but also to Romeo and even to Capulet, who lashed out at the old family servant as he tried to bully his daughter into marrying Paris. French’s Friar was another ambivalent part — the Nurse and Friar are empathetic figures but bad counselors — who brought out the best in the performances of his young charges. The Friar’s somewhat inexplicable cowardice in the final scene wasn’t really solved by French’s performance, but I’m not sure that plot-awkwardness is fully resolvable.

Charlotte Josephine as Mercutio and Josh Finan as Benvolio

The heart of the RSC’s summer show of Romeo and Juliet, though, was the young actors in the leading roles, especially Charlotte Josephine’s shadow-boxing Mercutio and Karen Fishwick’s Scottish-accented Juliet. Both women made their RSC debuts in this show. Bally Gil as Romeo isn’t quite as new to the RSC, but his open-hearted and open-armed lover-boy fit the show’s youthful core, along with debut actors in the parts of Paris (Afolabi Alli), Peter (Raif Clarke), Samson (Steve Basaula), and Benvolio (Josh Finan)

At halftime I chatted with some very distinguished Shakespeareans whom I won’t name but who have seen generations come and go on the RSC stage. They complained about Fishwick’s verse speaking, and about Josephine’s overly athletic and mannered Mercutio. They were right, on some level — technically right. The boxing distracted from the pentameter. But I couldn’t help feeling that they didn’t quite catch the vibe.

I’m here in Stratford with my daughter Olivia, who I always count on to give me the teenager’s report on these productions. (Her all-time favorite was Oscar Isaac’s four-hour Hamlet in the Public Theater last summer — which means she doesn’t mind long plays or tragedies, but is a bit susceptible to actors who also play the rebel pilot Poe Dameron in the latest Star Wars trilogy.) I would have liked to have gotten her read on Charlotte Josephine, but she’s still working on her jet lag and passed on this one.

I’ve seen Karen Fishwick before, in the impressively potty-mouthed musical “Our Ladies of Perpetual Succour,” the darling of Edinburgh Fringe that visited New Haven in the summer of ’16. As in New Haven, I wasn’t entirely convinced by Fishwick as Juliet. She was in places a bit overmastered by the verse: Juliet’s “Come night” monologue in 3.2 is some of Shakespeare’s most blazing poetry. Fishwick didn’t pace the speech right — though she did wonderfully throw herself back into her bedding to emphasize the childishness of the speech’s last moment, when Juliet likened her wait for Romeo to “the night before some festival / To an impatient child that hath new robes / And may not wear them” (3.2). There were some better moments, including most of her scenes with the Nurse, but Juliet’s the heart-core of the play, and Fishwick didn’t quite get all the way there.

Unless Charlotte Josephine’s Mercutio was the real heart, which got stabbed by Tybalt just before intermission. Josephine’s hyper-activity, which dismayed and distracted some members of the audience, also enlivened the part. The gender noncomformity in Josephine’s casting (Mercutio is one of the toxic swordfighting men of Verona) and in her buzz-cut faux-macho affect were compelling. Mercutio’s poetic playfulness and constant willingness to risk anything make it a hard part to contain, and the role can, as in this performance, put Romeo in the shade in the first act. When Josephine sputtered out Mercutio’s dying one-liner — “ask for me tomorrow, and you will find me a grave man” (3.1) — I wondered if the show could keep its fires burning without its brightest lamp.

The answer was partly that it could not, though Afolabi Alli’s Paris did his best. The second act felt the loss of possibility and of Mercutio’s reckless optimism. I’m not sure this young cast was all quite ready to carry the tragedy, but I look forward to seeing them try other roles in the future.

Heading off to JFK this evening for a night on Delta’s big steel bird, but the #radicalmischief begins today. I’m hoping, after a sleepless night & quick jaunt across the Midlands, to throw myself into the mix for a few hours tomorrow afternoon. But who knows what Hermes the god of travelers & interpretation will have to say?

It’ll be my fourth trip to the International Shakespeare Conference, counting two years ago in 2016 when the tiny ISC was swallowed by the great every-five-years whale of the World Shakespeare Congress, which was split in the anniversary year of 2016 between Stratford-upon-Avon and London. Singapore in 2021!

The highlight of these trips is the chance to see theater with a gaggle of my favorite Shakespeare nerds, plus my intrepid daughter Olivia, who joined me in 2016 and is back in 2018 at the age of fifteen. We’ve got tickets to three at the RSC in Stratford: Romeo and Juliet on Monday, Macbeth on Wed, and Duchess of Malfi on Th. Then we shift to London for Othello at the Globe (with Mark Rylance as Iago!) and an outdoor Tempest in Covent Garden. Plus a side-trip to Oxford to see the J.R.R. Tolkien exhibition at the Bod, not to mention high tea at the Berkeley Hotel!

Looking forward to seeing some Shakespeare friends in the UK!