SOURCE: Jackson, Russell. “Shakespeare Performed: Shakespeare at Stratford-upon-Avon: Summer and Winter, 1999-2000.” Shakespeare Quarterly 51, no. 2 (summer 2000): 217-29.

In the following excerpt, Jackson assesses the production of Othello staged during the 1999-2000 season at Stratford-upon-Avon. Jackson finds that Ray Fearon's and Zoë Waites's performances as Othello and Desdemona were “subtle and convincing” but reserves his highest praise for Richard McCabe's Iago.

Othello, like A Midsummer Night's Dream, gave a satisfying sense of having visited many—if not all—of the play's possibilities within the framework of a production seeking to find coherence in the text. In this case the setting was late-nineteenth century. Many local effects worked very well, as they have proved to do in other productions with a similar choice of period. The midnight council of the Venetian senate became a lamp-lit cabinet room, with a globe representing the world at stake in an imperialist struggle; the...