London Journal: Shakespeare’s Liars and Lovers

Johan Persson “Othello” at the National Theater.

LONDON â€" Iago was always a good liar. But I have never known him to quite as credible as he is in Nicholas Hytner’s smashing production of “Othello” at the National Theater here.

I often had to remind myself that what this eminently trustworthy-looking soldier, played by Rory Kinnear, was saying wasn’t true, even after he had told us that he was going to lie through his teeth. So you can imagine how effectively his poison, as he likes to call his cocktail of deceptions, works on his distracted commanding officer, Othello.

Mr. Hytner’s entire interpretation of Shakespeare’s oft-told tale of the Moor of Venice, which also stars Adrian Lester in the title role, is as unsettlingly feasible as its leading liar. Set mostly on a contemporary army base in Cyprus, this production makes killing use of the pressures and protocol of military life abroad to explain how the play’s homicides could happen.

If you’re a follower of Shakespeare in performance, you may by now be sighing, “Oh, not again.” It’s true that dressing up his war plays in latter-day khaki and camouflage fatigues has become all too common in recent years.

No matter how compellingly acted, such productions usually have moments of jarring disconnect, when the words chafe against the setting. You know, like when Richard III yells, “My kingdom for a horse!,” and a tank or a jeep comes rumbling in. I even felt that that way from time to time in Mr. Hytner’s celebrated “Henry V” in 2003, also starring Mr. Lester, which transplanted the Battle of Agincourt to modern-day Iraq.

That never happened in this “Othello.” Every aspect of Mr. Hytner’s version, designed by Vicki Mortimer, is deployed to propel the natural flow of the story and to illuminate character. This is not willfully topical, high-concept Shakespeare, the kind in which you imagine the director telling the cast in rehearsals, “Think post-traumatic stress disorder, guys.”

Instead, Mr. Hytner and his close to flawless ensemble use the landscape of recent films like “The Hurt Locker” and “Zero Dark Thirty” to find what’s eternally familiar in “Othello,” and by that I don’t mean only the dangers of sexual jealousy. I’m talking about how the combination of certain personalities, under stress, leads inevitably to explosion.

We understand acutely here what forces have shaped those personalities. Mr. Lester’s Othello is an officer long used to commanding others, a figure whose martial fierceness is contained by military discipline. He knows he has to be vigilant about his own behavior. When early on, he muses quietly to himself about his young bride Desdemona (Olivia Vinall), “When I love thee not love, chaos is come again,” it has an especially scary resonance.

He is presumably equally vigilant in combat. But he has also been conditioned to take those who serve him for granted. That makes it very easy for Mr. Kinnear’s Iago the underling to sabotage Othello, to whom he is almost invisible.

Mr. Kinnear, who was a vivid Hamlet for Mr. Hytner, here makes brilliant use of the anonymity allowed by the codes of military conduct. First planting the seeds of suspicion in Othello about Desdemona’s fidelity, this Iago is an Every Soldier, responding with eyes-lowered subservience (and on occasion, from a seemingly reluctant sense of duty) to his commanding officer.

As his ascendancy over Othello grows, and the balance of power shifts, he starts to sound like a drill sergeant barking orders. “Do it, soldier,” he seems to be saying, as he pushes his general toward murder, and we can see Mr. Lester’s increasingly overwhelmed Othello responding with the conditioned reflexes of the infantry man he must have once been.

With other characters, Iago has the bluff, hearty aspect of one of the beer-swigging guys, no better or worse. What’s not to trust? His wife, Emilia (Lyndsey Marshal), is in this production a fellow soldier. Accustomed to the ways of men on the base, she’s understandably cynical about the male sex in general but accepting of her husband. Ms. Vinall’s Desdemona is a spirited but clueless rich girl who has no idea what kind of world she has stepped into.

The acid test for me with Shakespeare, even more than with other plays, is whether the behavior of the people onstage corresponds to how the characters describe one another. In this production, it always, but always did. By its end, Mr. Hytner’s “Othello” has met the most essential prerequisite of tragedy: you believe that what has happened to these people had to happen. (This production is to be broadcast in cinemas this September as part of the National Theater Live program.)

John Haynes Michelle Terry as Titania and Pearce Quigley as Bottom in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

A sense that the course of true love might end in disaster also runs through Dominic Dromgoole’s hormonally charged production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” at Shakespeare’s Globe, the open-air theater that packs ‘em in come summer. This being a comedy, nobody dies in this agreeably rowdy production, designed as an Elizabethan fantasia by Jonathan Fensom. But the potential for violence festers throughout, and it starts at the top of the natural and supernatural worlds portrayed here.

Portraying both Theseus and Hippolyta, the king and queen of Athens, and Oberon and Titania, the king and queen of the fairies, John Light and Michelle Terry are a combative couple, as ready to sock as to kiss each other. As for the young, human lovers who get lost in the woods, they become snarling, scratching animals before they’re properly sorted out by Oberon’s fairy lieutenant, Puck (Matthew Tennyson), who himself is clearly in love with his boss.

Lust, it seems, drives everybody mad, mortals and sprites alike. And Mr. Dromgoole’s interpretation drolly emphasizes the ungainliness of sexual struggle. These lovers are always tying themselves into knots - I mean, physically, with arms entwined and entrapped.

When the amateur actors (led by Pearce Quigley, playing Bottom the Weaver as a languorous diva) stumble through their play within the play, their clumsiness isn’t so different from that of the couples we’ve already seen. The condescending onstage audience of Theseus and company really has no right to laugh, given what they’ve been through.

But what a relief it is to do so. That feeling sums up the enduring cathartic value of “Dream,” which provides a very different release from that of the anguished “Othello.”

The Globe’s new version of “The Tempest,” directed by Jeremy Herrin, isn’t as fully satisfying, though it has moments of insight and enchantment. The production stars the wonderful Roger Allam as Prospero. He’s a ripe-voiced, appropriately magisterial wizard, but he sometimes appears to be straining (the way gifted veterans of Shakespeare are known to do) to come up with radically fresh readings of familiar lines.

The production came most alive for me not as a tale of exile, dispossession and reconciliation, as it usually does, but of adolescent rebellion. Miranda, Prospero’s sheltered teenaged daughter, is played with ready-to-bolt feistiness by Jessie Buckley.

Those supernatural boys who will never grow up, the airy Ariel and the earthy Caliban, register more than usual as Miranda’s spiritual siblings. And it is they who most captivate the audience. On the night I was there, when James Garnon’s forever thwarted, Cain-like Caliban spat into the theatergoers next to the stage, he was applauded loudly for doing so.

And when Colin Morgan’s bewitching, slightly mournful Ariel asked Prospero, “Do you love me master?” and was met with silence, someone in the crowd called out, “I love you!” Mr. Morgan has developed a cult following playing the title character in the BBC’s “Merlin.” But the connection he forges with the audience has just as much to do with our knowing, or remembering, what it’s like to feel young, restless and under the thumb of capricious grown-ups.