“I am your own forever.” When these words are uttered in the electrifying new production of “Othello,” which opened on Monday night at the New York Theater Workshop, you feel you’ve heard the most frightening vow ever spoken. It is delivered at the end of the first half of a performance that is drawn in lightning.

The speaker is a soldier, Iago by name, played by Daniel Craig; the object of his ardent declaration is his general, Othello, portrayed by David Oyelowo. Their faces are as close as clasped hands, foreheads pressed hard together as if in some ungodly mind meld.

By that moment, you have come to know these men intimately. You understand exactly how they’ve arrived at such a moment of communion and exactly where they’re headed. As presented by two actors at the top of their game, in a marriage made in both heaven and hell, the story of Othello and Iago could not possibly end otherwise than it does.

And, O the pity of it!

Character truly is fate in this breathless interpretation of Shakespeare’s taut portrait of lives razed by jealousy, in which Mr. Oyelowo and Mr. Craig, best known as movie stars, enter the ranks of first-rate classical stage actors. I’ve never seen an “Othello” as convincingly inexorable as this one.