One Man's Moor

Othello traditionally requires two great actors to ignite, between them, the flaming poetry and the kindling passion of Shakespeare's tragedy. This British National Theater production, color-filmed on stagelike sets with a restrained cinema technique, is a one-man show that scants Iago to star Laurence Olivier as the Moor. London critics were overwhelmed by the almost inexhaustible resourcefulness of Olivier's stage interpretation. Archivists should cherish the film as a record of what happens when the greatest actor in the English-speaking theater attacks a famous, difficult role and stamps his genius upon it. Yet Olivier's Othello seems ultimately to be pitted less against Iago than against the Bard himself.

Pantherlike, vain and arrogant, Othello first appears sniffing a rose. His skin is dark as charcoal, his bass-toned speech richly thickened in a kind of classic calypso rhythm. Rolling his r's and his hips, he swaggers into an epic drama of a husband's jealousy reinforced as the story of a black man married to a white woman.

The approach is valid but Olivier overworks it, for his portrayal appears geared primarily to the task of impersonating a Negro. In his accomplished mimicry, there is often too much mammy singer, too little inner man. This lithe warrior defies tepid theatrical conventions, only to emerge as a modern stereotype, quick to violence and so infatuated with himself that his cue for murder seems to be wounded animal pride, not unhinging grief. He has size without tragic stature, brute strength and magnetism without "a constant, loving, noble nature." His ultimate downfall shrinks almost to the level of a squalid domestic intrigue.

Under Director Stuart Burge, the supporting cast is pallid. Frank Finlay's Iago is a meager adversary in all respects. Maggie Smith plays a resolute and poignant Desdemona, though her open, clear-eyed virtue ought to vindicate itself as easily as Iago's obvious machinations condemn him. As Cassio, Derek Jacobi seems a snub-nosed, undergraduate type whom no lion among men could seriously consider a rival.

As for the filming, the camera's merciless eye often annihilates the indispensable illusion of theater, leaping the distance that might lend more credibility to Olivier's thundercloud performance. His makeup looks false, and through the blackface gleams a supreme actor's intelligence, timing every phrase, calculating effects, revealing the mechanics of his trade in monstrous closeups. It is a spectacular display of virtuosity, but seldom very real or deeply moving or quite subservient to the Moor.

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