Review: Bedlam Gives Its Trademark Innovative Touch to a Top-Notch Othello

Shakespeare’s plays don’t need special effects, big names, or elaborate set designs. The Bard baked what he needed into his language to make us participants in the theater-making. “Think, when we talk of horses, that you see them,” he tells us in Henry V.

Eric Tucker and Bedlam, the company he co-founded in 2012, know this. In their productions of Hamlet and Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan, they used minimal scenery and a few choice props to make two mammoth works crackle. What’s more, they did both (in rep!) with only four actors playing all the roles.

Since then, Tucker has experimented successfully with other modes of theater (Sense and Sensibility and most recently Music City and Are the Bennet Girls OK?), but he has returned to Bedlam’s original aesthetic, brilliantly, with this Othello, now running at the troupe’s new home at the West End Theatre.

Once again, four actors play all the roles, with director Tucker taking on Iago. Two doors slam angrily at the outset, creating a threatening claustrophobia on the small stage, as Iago airs his grievances to Roderigo (Sussanah Millonzi) against Othello (Ryan Quinn), the Moorish general of the Venetian army. Iago has been passed over for a lieutenancy, which Othello has given to Cassio (Susannah Hoffman). Enraged at the affront, Iago vows revenge and plots to drive Othello mad with jealousy by telling him that his wife, Desdemona, has been having an affair with Cassio.

It takes a moment to calibrate as the actors start shifting between characters. When Iago and Roderigo expose Othello’s elopement with Desdemona to her father, Hoffman—who plays both daughter and father—transforms seamlessly from one to the other with a mere wrinkling of the brow and slight deepening of the voice. We’re never in doubt who’s who.

This is the kind of thing that Bedlam is really good at. Millonzi ably takes on a host of roles including Iago’s wife, Emilia, Desdemona’s staunch defender against Iago’s treachery. Ryan Quinn, one of the best Othellos I’ve ever seen, changes, somewhat ironically, to Cassio’s mistress, Bianca, with a slight reveal of the shoulders and a lilt to his voice.

Tucker nudges the racial implications of the play into the foreground a bit more than I’ve seen elsewhere. Roderigo holds an ominous black noose in his hands in the first scene, suggesting that the Venetian society that Othello has earned high status in is still willing to hang a Black man for marrying a white woman. This threat of masked bigotry also carries over into Tucker’s pungent delivery of Iago’s racially charged insults. Sam Debell’s earthy-colored hunting vest for Iago in contrast to Othello’s more exotically patterned jacket also draws stark attention to the latter’s status as an outsider.

As in Bedlam’s earlier productions, Tucker gets the audience out of the theater for a few minutes to rearrange the seating between acts. Act 1 has us positioned in a horseshoe of tiers, but Act 2 repositions the tiers into a circle, allowing for the actors to spread out into the dark spaces behind and between the risers (Cheyenne Sykes’s lighting takes advantage of these new shadows as the story darkens). This clever staging strategy makes the second act feel fresh and raises the dramatic stakes as the characters wildly orbit the stage during the final tense scenes before colliding in the center.

Tucker keeps his scenic design to a minimum. The most we get is a string of Christmas lights on the wall to indicate a tacky karaoke bar where Cassio drunkenly sings his reputation away. But there’s little need for scenery when the direction and the performances are this strong. Quinn deserves special praise for his devastating delivery of Othello’s “Haply, for I am black” soliloquy. And it is a stroke of genius on Tucker’s part to watch Bianca, weeping for Cassio, transform into Othello as he looks down on a sleeping Desdemona, like we’re watching a cinematic cross-fade. Bedlam gets props for once again letting us see a classic work in new ways.