The week in theatre: Othello; Baghdaddy – review
Paul Hilton, another highly accomplished actor, will thrill those who like their Iagos overtly villainous (I have to confess to preferring the frisson of Iagos who are plausibly “nice”). This Iago has a haggard, malnourished look, with a greasy forelock and a nasty little dictator’s moustache. When he talks to himself early on, he comes across as pathetic with the self-importance of someone struggling against a lower status than he would like to have. Later, he turns into a more lethal practical joker, a pantomime villain without a pantomime.
Rory Fleck Byrne’s fresh, honest and affecting Cassio is in pleasing contrast, living up to the marvellous line “Cassio hath a daily beauty in his life”, and Tanya Franks applies a keen intelligence to Emilia’s dimwitted collusion with her husband. But it is Desdemona who steals this show – I have never seen the part better played. She is too often no more than a lamb to the slaughter, a trampled petal. Rosy McEwen is brave, upright, her own woman – and movingly embodies absolute trust right up to the end. And speaking of endings, although I understand the temptation to trim and tidy (and Shakespeare is infinitely hospitable to changes), to finish with Iago repeating the line “What you know, you know” is as crude as defacing the text with a highlighter pen.
Jasmine Naziha Jones is a British Iraqi actor who stars at the Royal Court in her first play, a semi-autobiographical exploration of growing up as the daughter of an Iraqi father in the UK as the Gulf war broke in 1990-91, and in the turbulent years that followed. There is no mistaking Naziha Jones’s integrity or her multitasking talent. But Baghdaddy (a nice coinage) is unevenly written and a mixed experience to watch. It is filled with theatrical novelties that stifle the story itself. Milli Bhatia restively directs shouting clowns in scarlet and green who act as sinister, tub-thumping, interventionist narrators. The feel is of a bullying playschool with a lot of dry ice and loud confrontation.
The play begins and ends in McDonald’s (convincingly conjured by designer Moi Tran with graceful white arches that seamlessly translate to the scenes in Iraq). We look in on a McDonald’s unhappy meal as Dad, played with likable gravity by Philip Arditti, is, in his daughter’s company, suddenly extinguished, his head, with its McDonald’s party hat, dropping in prayer or defeat – hard to say which. The satire throughout is thin and the slapstick tiresome. One example: three posh philanthropists, with their hearts in the wrong place, are sneeringly overstated – most charitable efforts are surely not so wrongfooted?
But far more seriously problematic is the preaching-to-the-converted quality of Naziha Jones’s final polemic about Britain’s role in the Iraq war. It is a fair bet that no one in the Royal Court’s audience will have disagreed with a word. Perhaps it should not come as a surprise that the evening’s most liberating ensemble moments scrap speech altogether and turn to dance instead – war as a nightmare disco (the playwright’s dancing proves another of her strengths). But in the end – and at the end – the most moving and powerful offering is the simplest: Dad launches into an account of the death of his brother, a carpenter who got killed on his way to work. This is unexpectedly written as a rhyming ballad and beautifully delivered, and there is no one to interrupt: he is alone with the story itself.
Star ratings (out of five)
Othello ???
Baghdaddy ??
Othellois at the Lyttelton, London, until 21 January 2023
Baghdaddy is at the Jerwood Theatre Downstairs, Royal Court, London, until 17 December
