These days it's becoming hard to write about the theatre without praising Nicholas Hytner. Can't he do something wrong so that we critics can start looking less like courtiers?
His latest crime is to direct a terrifically exciting, exceptionally coherent Othello. His production drives forward with hyper-clarity, as if each line, each twist of plot were being x-rayed. It startles an audience into laughter. It pulls off, almost casually, a major reinterpretation, batting away the notion that Shakespeare's drama is dominated by racism. Its triumph depends on tremendous perfomances by Adrian Lester and Rory Kinnear. It also depends on Hytner.
This Othello is another testament to what he has made of the National. Time and again his abrasive modern stagings have shown Shakespeare to be urgent. This was a project he set about immediately after taking over the theatre. The first play he directed was an anti-Iraq war Henry V. He rescued this Henry from the brilliant propagandising of Laurence Olivier's movie. He made Adrian Lester his king.
Now Lester is again re-creating a part associated with Olivier. His performance has been keenly anticipated by Hustle fans and by those who saw him in Red Velvet as Ira Aldridge, the 19th-century African American actor who became celebrated as a declamatory Othello. No one will be disappointed. It's the sunniness that hits you first. Lester lollops on to the stage blazing with authority. Soldiers would follow him anywhere. The self-conscious orotundity of his speech is emphatic but not overdone: he is gullible, not absurd. The eloquence that breaks out of him as he murders and dies is terrible and marvellous.
His openness is in perfect opposition to Kinnear's caustic concealment. This is an Iago marinated in scorn, a man whose bluff is to be bluff. With his inturned face and estuarised accent, Kinnear's most surprising ploy is to shock the audience into laughing at his bitter ingenuity. He is an actor who never seems to be expressing himself. He builds character by making every gesture look as if it were a habit. He bites his fingernails, punches the air in triumph, plants his feet aggressively apart as if about to charge. The meticulously calibrated scene in which he begins to rouse Othello to jealousy shows both actors at their height. Kinnear nods and grunts as if to himself, drawing Lester's attention to what he is ostentatiously hiding. He is like a master technician rewinding the mechanism of a clock, tweaking a spring, running a finger along a cog. Lester's radiance gradually becomes occluded; you see his sun going in.
Lucidity fuels excitement. Hytner has written sympathetically of the panic attacks that overcome him as the curtain goes up on a Shakespeare play and you don't know what anyone is talking about. The opening of The Tempest always convulses me. A few speeches have been sharpened here by cutting some knotty conceits. No one should take the huff. Othello is Shakespeare's sixth-longest play, almost twice as long as The Comedy of Errors. It can take a trim.
The play can also take an updating. Vicki Mortimer's design, though lame in the first scene, is a powerful engine of the action. Her Cypriot military garrison is a place of concrete and camouflage, a brutal arena in which even the scene changes are given a bullying emphasis. The sets slide out from the back of the stage, moving towards the audience like tanks. Harsh bursts of music pump them along, pushing one scene into the next. Olivia Vinall's frail and eager Desdemona is a leaf blown about on the gusts of testosterone. Lyndsey Marshal's Emilia is a passionate squaddie.
So central did Hytner consider the military context that he hired as an adviser Jonathan Shaw, who served in the army for more than 30 years. The appointment paid dividends. The sense of dependency between Othello and Iago which Shaw traces in an illuminating programme note is apparent in the production. "Betrayal is the most heinous of military sins," he writes, "so it is the last to be suspected." For once, Othello's credulity is convincing and Iago's hatred has not justification but cause. This is an essential National production. Very, well, Moorish.
Othello runs in the Olivier repertoire until the autumn, with a National Theatre Live broadcast on 26 September
