An   Othello for the 1990s

[R]acial issues are emphasized [in Nunn's production], although they are not stressed as explicitly and forcefully as in other versions (Suzman's, for example). . . . [Racial hatred] remains understated, however, throughout this production, as if it were implicit in the situation but not dominant.

Nunn's Othello emphasizes instead the search for meaning in human relationships, the struggle to find trust and intimacy in a world of appearances, the fragility of human bonds. This emphasis, too, strikes me as symptomatic of the 1990s, when each day's newspaper features the story of another battered woman murdered by her husband or boyfriend, and talk-show hosts probe people's most intimate secrets on nationwide television. Whether Nunn's concept of Othello was directly influenced by the feminist criticism of Shakespeare that proliferated during the 1980s, I cannot say. But this production is more nuanced in its treatment of gender relations than any I have seen, not just because the women's lines are uncut and the roles superbly acted, but because all human relations, man to man and woman to woman, as well as man to woman, are depicted as problematic within a patriarchal social structure. Nunn's Othello depicts the fear of women's sexuality embedded in Shakespeare's text and recently described by Susan Snyder as the "psychosocial web that ensnares men and women alike."

Nunn's Othello makes gender relations even more difficult by emphasizing the play's military milieu -- the struggle for advancement up the ranks, the coarse humor of the barracks, the fleeting moments of male intimacy interrupted by the bugle's blare and a return to protocol, and the exclusion of women from the business at hand. The entire production questions, in ways that seem strikingly contemporary, the impact of a military career on an individual's ability to relate to others, especially in the United States where the recent Tailhook scandal revealed the sexism of military culture and where feminists and homosexuals are challenging traditional military regulations.

What makes this Othello compelling, then, is a link between the marital and the martial. Though they seem to represent disparate spheres of human activity, Nunn portrays them as joined by the human compulsion to create and, in Iago's case, to destroy intimacy.