Product Details

• Actors: Tim McInnerny, Zoe Tapper, Eamonn Walker
• Directors: Wilson Milam
• Format: Color, DVD, NTSC, Widescreen
• Language: English
• Region: Region 1 (U.S. and Canada only. Read more about DVD formats.)
  
• Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1
• Number of discs: 2
• Rating: NR (Not Rated)
• Studio: KULTUR VIDEO
• DVD Release Date: March 25, 2008
• Run Time: 195 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• ASIN: B0012EM5CE
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #60,042 in Movies & TV (See Bestsellers in Movies & TV)

Editorial Reviews

Review

This DVD from Kultur captures a production at the historic Globe Theatre where all of Shakespeare's plays originated. Othello is presented in this version on simplistic terms without a set but with plenty of traditional period costuming. The Globe is an outdoor venue, and there is little lighting design required or able to be used. This is as primitive and elemental as you can get, without any of the flashy technical arts of the theatre to fall back on. The production hinges on the performances to keep an audience glued for over three hours.

Luckily, the cast is up to the challenge of performing this well-known known tragedy, and that is the most compelling reason to sit down with Kultur's DVD edition, which presents a previously televised presentation. Eamonn Walker (Duma) has played the role of Othello a number of times, and his performance is fiery and competent. The actor brings dignity, grace, and the perfect energy to make you believe in the Moor's dilemma, which forces him into a murderous, jealous rage. Character actor Tim McInnerny (The Black Adder) makes Iago appropriately evil and maniacal. Zoe Tapper (The Last Van Helsing) is visually stunning as well as earnest as the doomed Desdemona. The actors make the verses move quickly, and they all have a nice intense energy that suits this staging.

It's nice to see Othello performed without any gimmicks or stunt casting. Theatre fans and Shakespeare aficionados will be satisfied and pleased with this primal staging at a historic location. Anyone hoping for spectacle or reinvention won't find any of that in director Wilson Milam's traditional interpretation. You can see the audience reacting to the production thanks to the three-quarter thrust nature of the Globe's stage, and you feel as if you are in Stratford right along with the ticket buyers. Othello contains a strong cast performing a classic tragedy, and for those reasons, it's a fine DVD to connect with the Bard's work --DVD Verdict, Judge Brett Cullum

Product Description

Performed for the first time at Shakespeare s Globe Theatre, with its racing concentrated plot and intense dramatic detail, Othello is one of Shakespeare's most exciting, atmospheric and heartbreaking plays. This is a tale of uncontrollable jealousy, deception and murder driven by one of theatre's greatest villains.

"Full of pace and energy... Eamonn Walker brings to Othello dignity, grace and a fine sense of the contradiction that leads Othello to lament the pity of it even as he prepares to murder Desdemona" THE GUARDIAN

"Walker cuts a charismatic and brooding figure. He charts the hero's descent into murderous jealousy with a vivid physicality... Zoë Tapper (Desdemona) is enchanting". THE INDEPENDENT

The seriously disturbed side of Tim McInnerny's lago is riveting, with his pushiness morphing, in soliloquies, into a manic fury." THE INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY

"The play suits the Globe better than any I've seen." TIME OUT

"Desdemona is perfection, the best I have ever seen. Tim McInnerny has been brilliantly cast as lago." OBSERVER

CAST
Bianca: Zawe Ashton
Cassio: Nick Barber
Aemelia: Lorraine Burroughs
Rodorgio: Sam Crane
Montano: Nigel Hastings
Clown: Paul Lloyd
Lago: Tim McInnerny
Duke of Venice: Jonathan Newth
Gratiano: Michael Taibi
Desdemona: Zoë Tapper
Lodovico: Dickon Tyrell
Senator / Soldier: Che Walker
Othello: Eamonn Walker
Director: Wilson Milam
Designer: Dick Bird
Composer: Stephen Warbeck

This production of OTHELLO was first performed at Shakespeare"s Globe Theatre, London on 4th May 2007. Recorded live.

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars True to the Original, May 11, 2008

By	NC Reader (NC) - See all my reviews

Theater in Shakespeare's time was popular entertainment for the masses and not highbrow art. The Globe Theatre in London continues that tradition with this production of Othello. In contrast to productions of Othello in which the actors are self-consciously striving to be "deep", the actors here are playing for the crowd.

By no means does this make the quality of the performance suffer. Eamonn Walker brings a brooding physical presence to the stage as Othello. Zoe Tapper is amazing as Desdemona - beautiful and with a clear voice that makes her lines easy to follow. It is Tim McInnerny as Iago who rules the stage, though - the audience is alternately laughing at him as he manipulates the hapless Rodrigo, and then is horrified as he manipulates Othello.

Add to this the reconstructed Globe Theatre in London, and you have a winning combination. You need not be a Shakespeare scholar to enjoy this production - just a human being.

19 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars The Tragedy of Othello Undermined By Jigs and Clowns, Or What Did Shakespeare Know?, March 31, 2008

By	Stanley H. Nemeth (Garden Grove, CA United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This production may rightly be praised for its eye-opening uses of the thrust stage of the "restored" Shakespearean Globe Theater. Not only are we spared unnecessarily elaborate sets and flamboyant costumes, but the action surprisingly is not set, say, on the far side of the moon, in the fashion nowadays of "innovative" stage directors who themselves often sorely need a director. The Globe Theater set-up happily allows the action and the language of a play to emerge clearly and naturally as its principal stars. Further, almost all members of the assembled cast speak their lines with exemplary intelligibility (Kudos to Patsy Rodenburg, the diction coach). A partial exception, however, is the Desdemona, the beautiful but finally cloying Zoe Tapper, whose vocal prowess ranges from the high-pitched strident to the high-pitched sorely beset, losing communication of any interiority of character as a consequence. Her voice in future stage roles would probably benefit, as did Vivien Leigh's under the tutelage of Laurence Olivier, by being lowered at least half, if not a whole octave.

The various scenes of this tragedy, as indicated, flow with a wonderful momentum, reproducing as they do the probable minimalism of the original seventeenth-century production. Also, the use of multiracial casting works to dispel the notion that the play is more about racial prejudice than about an unusual but wholly commendable case of intermarriage meant to circumvent any tribalist notions of human nature the audience may hold. But casting both Emilia and Bianca as black women whose race is never commented on raises as many problems as it solves. For one thing, it renders Brabantio's surprising disgust at his daughter's marriage to the Moor wholly unntelligible and throws much else in the play out of whack, since mixed marriages or relationships seem the order of the day, not the singular triumph of Desdemona, who "saw Othello's visage in his mind."

Despite whatever strengths mentioned, remaining flaws in this production quickly and disastrously overwhelm its merits. In my view, the philistine director Wilson Milam is the principal problem. His real wish, as his commentary indicates, is to present "Othello, the Comedy," since it hasn't been done before. The heart of his production, accordingly, is the Iago-Roderigo relationship, which benighted Shakespeare had thought, at best, a sidebar to the pity and terror of the tragedy of the uxorious Moor. Comedy is clearly director Milam's interest. Nothing else meaningful is underlined in the swift passage of scenes. The play's central themes of diverse responses to loss and the nature of patience in affliction hardly emerge to lend meaning and beauty to the action, thus rendering the great tragedy just an interesting, if pointless, piece of viciousness. What the director emphasizes instead is tomfoolery. The clowns speak more than has been written down for them (pace Hamlet), and impertinent jigs needed to keep a Polonius awake are inserted, too (again, pace Hamlet). The actor playing Iago is unfortunately allowed to wrench the play even further out of proportion. The laughter which rightly greets his manipulation of the hapless Roderigo inappropriately raises its head in scenes where we're clearly meant to sympathize wholly with the noble and anguished Othello and Desdemona, not laugh along with Iago. A.C.Bradley famously observed that "the genius of Shakespeare in creating Iago is that we, the audience, never lose sympathy with Othello and Desdemona." But what did Shakespeare know? Director Milam crudely upsets this brilliant balance.

In truth, the only scene which suggests any tragic pain and horror is the closing one, and by then it's too late for it to make much of an effect on the also shockingly barbaric, inappropriately giggling Globe audience. Moreover, and for the record, even this final scene, which mostly works, isn't free of a glaring directorial miscalculation. When Desdemona discovers that Othello really intends to kill her, she leaps off her bed, banging on the locked bedroom door and screaming for her own rescue in the manner of a B-movie gun moll about to be bumped off. Her behavior here is hardly of a piece with her beautiful final response moments later to the question of who committed such violence upon her person, "Nobody. I myself." In conclusion, the actors and the tragedy itself deserved a director (and perhaps an audience, too) more willing to confront the text's shocking power and pain straight on.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Not a flawless production, but a strong one, May 22, 2009

By	Nora L. Corrigan (Columbus, MS) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

If you've never seen a production at the Globe, this DVD is worth the price just for the chance to see this unique playing space in action. The audience interaction is wonderful, and the gathering darkness reinforces the tone and mood of the final scenes in ways that I hadn't anticipated. It's easy for modern-day readers to forget that Shakespeare wrote his plays with outdoor performance in mind, and that early modern audiences were only inches from the actors, and this production makes inventive use of these staging conditions. The play is performed with very few cuts -- it's a rare chance to see often-cut material like the Clown scenes, and this makes it an excellent version to use in the classroom.

Unfortunately, Tim McInnerney's Iago is not wholly convincing, especially in his soliloquys and his big scene with Othello (3.3). While his scenes with Roderigo are entertaining, he comes across as too angry throughout this production, and it's hard to see why Othello and the other characters trust him. I found it difficult to imagine an Iago with so little control over his own emotions as a plausible manipulator. Zoe Tapper's Desdemona, on the other hand, is pitch-perfect. She's too often played as a shrinking violet, but Desdemona is the descendant of Shakespeare's earlier comic heroines like Rosalind and Beatrice. Tapper's Desdemona is genuinely innocent, and bewildered at the change in Othello's behavior, but at the same time, she's a bold young woman who defies her father to marry for love, banters with Iago, and pleads Cassio's case at the risk of further antagonizing her husband. Her final scene with Emilia and her murder work particularly well, but so do her earlier scenes; her affection for Walker's Othello is real and tangible, and this production feels like a comedy that has missed its way.

I enjoyed this video very much, and I look forward to sharing it with my students. I hope there will be more Globe performances released on video in the future.