On trimming the Bard

NEW YORK -- First-time screenwriter/director Oliver Parker is blunt about his unorthodox approach to the text of Shakespeare's Othello: "I had to cut about 60 percent of it. You actually do a disservice to the piece if you did it in its entirety. I'm trying to imagine how Shakespeare would have written it for film."

Citing precedents, he says, "Orson Welles was wonderfully irreverent. He took the bits he wanted and almost told a different story. His revolves around the character of Othello, as the Olivier one did. I was concerned with getting the balance right. I wanted to allow Iago to be as cheeky and entertaining and fascinating as he is."

One way of doing that was to allow his Iago, Kenneth Branagh, to address the camera directly. "This business of talking to the camera was something I found very tricky. You don't know who you're talking to," says Branagh, who had never tried this technique in his own Shakespeare adaptations. "This forces the audience to be dragged into this awful situation. It makes them feel about Iago the way some of the characters do."

"Having played Iago on stage," explains Parker, "I find it terrifically exciting engaging an audience. There's an opportunity to implicate the audience in what he's up to. Part of Ken's take on it is, you have a guy who you think is trustworthy, witty, and charming until halfway through, when you're convinced he's a psycho."

To bring that casual conversational charm to Shakespeare's dialogue, Branagh says, "You have to find the truth of the character. Don't saddle yourself with some tremendously fruity, plummy voice."

It helps to work among actors not trained in the English stage tradition. "I like the dynamic of different cultural backgrounds, different accents, different sounds. Any approach is legitimate. We had a United Nations casting situation here. We had the Geneva-Belfast-Brooklyn triumvirate. I found it very healthy."

"The real difficult thing is to get a good grasp of the part, not especially to speak good English," says the Swiss-born Irene Jacob (of Red), who plays Desdemona. "It's just about getting used to getting the words in your mouth," says the film's American Othello, Laurence Fishburne. "It's English. It's my first language."

Parker claims an authenticity in his international casting, noting, "Venice was a city of commerce, an international town." He calls Jacob's linguistic awkwardness deliberate. "She was so good at getting the English down that I was worried we'd lose her French accent, which I find charming. She's not as intimidated by Shakespeare as English people are. We've been brought up with it, and we treat it so reverentially we lose the actual point. Irene doesn't have that as a background, and neither does Laurence. That immediacy makes it contemporary and exciting."

Fishburne was nervous, however, about having no Shakespeare training. "For a month, I was freakin' out, just buggin', and talking to every actor I had ever met who had done the part or done Shakespeare. I was on a plane, and Kelsey Grammer was there, and I was like, `Kelsey! Kelsey! Help me!' He was like, `You'll be fine.' I saw Patrick Stewart at the Tonys. `Patrick! Will you bless me?' Roscoe Lee Browne and I had great conversations over what we thought the Moor should sound like. I was terrified until I got to London and started rehearsing. After two days with everyone, I was like, `OK, We're at work. I'm fine.' "

Fishburne is quite conscious of being the first African-American Othello on screen, and he can't help but notice the story's resonance in post-O.J. America. "If you take the word `America,' you know what you get? You get this. [Rewrites "AMERICA" as an anagram: "I AM RACE."] This play was written at the beginning of the slave trade. It was a direct response to Shakespeare seeing an influx of Africans suddenly in Europe. So that's always been the message of the play. The man is a noble cat, he's a man of power, he's in love with this woman, and all of the shit which comes at him and this woman is about that."

Although Parker shot the film during the trial, he insists that the O.J. correspondences are coincidental. Parker's point is not to pander, says Jacob (whose brother Daniel is a professor of atmospheric chemistry at Harvard), though the film has more nudity than most Shakespeare adaptations. Of her honeymoon sex scene with Fishburne, she says, "I don't think Oliver's point was to put sex and violence in so that people would go see Shakespeare. It's shot like something very tender and passionate, not something like Basic Instinct. The point is to tell a beautiful story that would touch the audiences in different senses."

Of course, sex also helps fill seats. "Shakespeare had shares in his theater. He cared about the box office," says Parker. "I believe this is worth bringing to a lot of people. Some people think Othello is just a board game. We've got somewhere to go."

-- Gary Susman