Modernizing the Hero

Eunha Na1

Review on the play Iago and Othello2

Once the most beloved and frequently staged of all western playwrights in Korea since the premiere of Hamlet (1951), Shakespeare seems to have become something too classic and literary (almost mandatory as cultural or academic experience) for today’s

Korean audience. Such conviction is not without ground when we see the theater box- offices in Seoul being bombarded with popular musicals and more contemporary plays from the Broadway or the West End. After being catered with the breath-taking spectacles and boisterous entertainment, you’ll feel it as a torture to bear the full-length plays packed with words and quaint rhetorical expressions.

It must be something to do with such realization that a series of experimental productions of Shakespearean plays sprang up with fresh interpretations in recent years.

Koreanizing, so called by some directors and critics, is going on with staging comedies while other directors have taken a separate course for tragedies (history plays, as well).

1 Seoul National University graduate student. 2 Adapted from Shakespeare’s Othello by the Theater Company Moollee, performed in LG Art Center, Seoul.

143 With the latter, the focus lingers on the heroes of each play; but younger generation directors—distinguishing themselves from their predecessors—are interested in how to bring onto the stage the inner struggles and conflicts of each character. Now expressionism, although belated, seems to have taken the place of realism in the theater, at least in some of the most memorable productions recently performed. Tae-sook Han as director is in the forefront of this new trend, who directed Lady Macbeth, Richard III, the Hunchback, and Iago and Othello since 1999. Iago and Othello is her latest work with her own theater company called the Theater Company Moollee.

Early on in the play, Iago appears on the stage carrying a sack as large as himself. But the sack seems light enough for him to handle. Iago, first looking at the sack with indifference, slowly begins to move around the stage with it. Accompanied by the grotesque tune of string instruments, his steps and movements gradually become almost dance-like. The dance later turns into a wrestle with the sack where Iago finally gains

144 control. He kicks, hurls, and jumps on the sack. The sack, as is the fate of Othello, is something for Iago to play and ultimately conquer.

As its title Iago and Othello hints at what to expect from the play, the focus of the play will be on Iago as much as on Othello, if not more. Director Han suggested in her interview with LG Art Center, where the play premiered, that the soul of the play lies in the complexity of Iago. Iago may have received due critical attention in academia, but maybe not enough on the Korean stage. It is a rare chance for the audience to immerse themselves into what is happening in Iago’s mind apart from the external events happening in Cyprus.

The most unexpected but striking feature in Iago and Othello is the occasional appearance of the black dog when Iago is left alone on the stage. Han uses various objets and non-verbal elements (like the aforementioned sack) to add the most theatrical elements to the original text, leaving the audience with intensified impressions of

145 certain scenes. Played by an actor in a charcoal-colored bodysuit, the black dog embodies Iago’s consciousness and serves as a ‘living objet.’ The dog sniffs and gnarls at Iago, almost threatening him; but as the evil in him grows, it is attacked, severely beaten, and finally drowned by Iago in a pool that appears temporarily on the stage.

Iago’s voice is another tool to show him a versatile actor in the production and a veritable ‘actor’ in his own scheme in the play. Iago’s versatility, as Othello esteems it, is ironically presented through his mimicking of Othello and even Desdemona in their styles of speech and tones of voice. This shows how meticulous Han is about arranging sounds and voices of actors and actresses (those who have seen Lady Macbeth, even if they forgot what the heroine looked like on the stage, will remember her low- pitched, gurgling voice that trembles the air). Just before the crucial deathbed scene,

Iago sings the willow song—a song to be sung by Desdemona in the original text of

Shakespeare—with a feeble, soprano-like voice, which sounds helpless but mocking at the same time.

Pak Chi-il as Iago moves with alacrity and climbs up to the top of the iron structure as if he owns the whole stage. Chang U-jin as Othello, despite grandiose and dignified gestures, looks heavier in his general’s costume and sluggish, and his movements seem confined within boundaries. As the play proceeds, his presence almost becomes a backdrop. Even his poetic speech sounds unreal when we see him as a hyper.

Often presented as beautiful but passive character, Desdemona in this production is a

146 strong woman who never gives up on her will to live until the last moment. In her life- and-death struggle with her jealousy-driven husband, which takes place on the 12- meter-long slope for several minutes, she even gets the better of him and nearly strangles him. Violence takes the place of obedience and resignation once her life is at stake. When her attempt to escape turns out to be futile, with all the power that is left for her, she howls and waves a white blanket of gigantic size before her as a desperate gesture to prove her chastity. It fails to shield her; for it is all that her small, innocent handkerchief brought about, which now became full-blown into a huge blanket in the inner eyes of her husband.

One may wonder why such a villain as Iago must be in the spotlight, anyway. Because he is so attractive and powerful like Milton’s Satan? Rather than being such embodiment of pure evil, Iago in the play is presented as someone with multiple personality. His complexity, according to Han, is the very characteristic shared by people living in a fragmentary world like ours. When it comes to survival, every one of us has the potential to be a schemer like Iago if motivated for grudge and vengeance.

There we may find the answer to why Iago does not perish but keeps coming back, and why of all tragedies the director finds in Othello the most direct link with the Korean audience today. As he says in the opening and again at the end of the play, “I bleed, sir; but not kill’d.”

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