Ophelia Lovibond on Iago: ‘None of it adds up’

The great thing about Shakespeare is that he gives you so many challenges and problems to solve. Iago is fascinating. He convinces Othello – the man who is his boss and who thinks they’re best friends – that his wife has slept with someone else, and drives Othello mad with jealousy. And it’s really not clear why he does it. Iago has these soliloquies addressed to the audience where he offers any number of reasons – that he’s been passed over for promotion, that he needs the money, that his own wife has been unfaithful and he’s out for revenge. Is he pure evil? Is he jealous? None of it adds up.

My sense is that he’s a psychopath, in the clinical sense. He seems to have no empathy or remorse. He’s the guy who sees a car crash and says, “oh, that looks interesting”. Maybe that’s the really frightening thing about Iago: he’s not some kind of pantomime villain. He walks among us.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Pure evil? Ewan McGregor plays Iago opposite Chiwetel Ejiofor’s Othello at the Donmar Warehouse in London, 2007. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

There are a lot of Shakespeare parts I’d love to play, but Iago is at the top of the list. I don’t see any reason why a female actor shouldn’t play male roles. Brilliant all-female productions have shown that. In fact, you can imagine a backstory. If Iago is a woman in the military, maybe that’s why she’s been passed over for promotion. Or there’s a particular dynamic between her and Othello, something a little charged. I’d love to play that.

Ophelia Lovibond is in The Bay at Nice at the Menier Chocolate Factory, London, until 4 May.

Paapa Essiedu on Lady Macbeth: ‘She absorbs the play’s horrors’

When people describe Lady Macbeth as this cold-hearted battleaxe, it does her a huge disservice; she’s one of Shakespeare’s most shapeshifting characters. You see her being intimate, ambitious, calculating, fierce, a loving wife, the life and soul of the party, the most charming person in the room. She’s such an astute politician. She knows how the men in power work. Then, in her sleepwalking scene near the end of the play, she’s unbearably vulnerable. It’s shocking to see that. It’s almost like she absorbs the horrors of the play. Macbeth just withdraws and disappears, but Lady Macbeth actually feels them. Then she’s destroyed by them.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘She’s a shapeshifter’: Tara Fitzgerald as Lady Macbeth and Ray Fearon as Macbeth at the Globe theatre, London, 2018. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

It’s her vulnerability that strikes me. She says very clearly that she’s had a child and knows “how tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me”, and yet there’s no sign of that child on stage. So she must have lost it somehow, and if you think about that trauma, maybe that’s part of what’s going on.

It’s a misogynistic view to see Lady Macbeth as a woman manipulating her weak-willed husband into doing something. I see it as more that she’s releasing something inside him. It’s simply that she has the courage to see it, and knows what needs to be done. She gets it, I suppose. That’s what I admire about her.

Paapa Essiedu is in Gangs of London, coming soon to Sky Atlantic

Jade Anouka on Viola: ‘The mask and the character blur’

The frustrating thing about female roles in Shakespeare is that often they don’t feel like they’re a driving force. They’re not really in charge. They react as much as they act. For the last seven years, I’ve been involved in the Donmar’s all-female Shakespeare trilogy in London and New York, playing Mark Antony in Julius Caesar, Hotspur in Henry IV and Ariel in The Tempest. It’s been like looking at Shakespeare with fresh eyes, you see him anew.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Gender fluid: Sally Tatum as Viola and Clive Wood as Sir Toby Belch in Twelfth Night at the Novello, London, 2005. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

But one of the female characters who’s a bit different is Viola in Twelfth Night. I played Olivia at the Bolton Octagon years ago, but have always had a thing about Viola. Those two women do feel like they’re driving things: they’re the centre around which the rest of the play turns. Maybe that’s because Viola isn’t really a woman for most of the play. The plot is that she disguises herself as a man, whereupon Olivia falls in love with her/him. There’s so much comedy in that situation, so much delicacy and lightness. The two of them have great scenes together: the big one in act three, where Viola realises what’s going on and tries to extricate herself from the situation, is beautifully poised.

Shakespeare’s playfulness about gender is amazing. Technically, Viola is dressing as a man, but for the whole play it’s kind of on the edge – she’s somehow both male and female. Maybe Olivia is in on that, and that’s part of the thrill. The mask and the character blur together. These plays are 400 years old, but they keep giving us new things.

Jade Anouka stars in Cleaning Up

Roger Allam on Benedick: ‘You’re rooting for him’

I played Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing nearly 30 years ago at the RSC, alongside Susan Fleetwood as Beatrice, and I loved every minute. Benedick absolutely reflects the movement of the play: at the beginning he’s funny in a lighthearted way, then deadly serious, then funny in a different kind of way – wiser, more grown-up. The role has so many monologues, you’re confiding in the audience the whole time. And when you play him, it’s like being inside someone much more intelligent and sharp than you are. When you get it right, you feel like there are 1,500 Benedick supporters in the room.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Sparring partners: Kenneth Branagh as Benedick and Emma Thompson as Beatrice in the 1993 film version of Much Ado About Nothing. Photograph: Allstar/BBC

Though, of course, the audience is rooting for Beatrice too: those sparring matches between the two of them, where they’re trading witticisms by the dozen, are the heart of the play. The strange thing is that, technically, Beatrice and Benedick are the subplot. The main story of Much Ado is the love affair between another couple, Claudio and Hero, which threatens to go disastrously wrong after Claudio is fooled into thinking that Hero has been unfaithful to him. Beatrice and Benedick get dragged in: he’s forced to choose between his best friend and the woman he loves, just moments after he’s told her he loves her. That’s what I like about the play: there’s such humanity there. You see how complicated life is.

Would I like to play him again? Maybe. I think it can work well when Beatrice and Benedick are older; there are hints that they’ve had some kind of relationship in the past, though it’s maybe more of a skirmish. But I like the idea that it’s the last-chance saloon for them. You’re rooting for them, aren’t you?

Roger Allam is in Rutherford and Son at the National Theatre, London, from 16 May

John Kani on Othello: ‘The odd one out’

In South Africa in 1987, apartheid was still going strong. Some of the most brutal race laws had been relaxed, but they hadn’t yet been repealed. There was still a lot of tension. One day, Janet Suzman, who was an old friend, called me up and said: “We should do Othello.” A couple of years before, I’d done Strindberg’s Miss Julie alongside a white female actor, Sandra Prinsloo, and someone attacked me. I had 11 stab wounds. I said: “Janet, I’m not sure this is going to end well.”

In the end, we started rehearsing at the Market theatre in Johannesburg. I’d read Shakespeare in school, translated into isiXhosa, and loved the stories, but I hadn’t realised before I started reading the English text how powerful the language was – the great surging speeches Othello has. “Her father loved me, oft invited me; / Still questioned me the story of my life …” It’s like music.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘He’s never quite at home’: Ray Fearon as Othello and Richard McCabe as Iago in the RSC’s 1999 production. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

Othello is the odd one out in the play, the only black man in a world full of white people. He tells us this amazing life story – that he was sold into slavery and escaped somehow, before becoming a soldier. Now he’s been hired as a mercenary and treated as a great general in the Venetian army. But he’s never quite at home in that society. He’s one of them, until he’s chooses to marry one of their white daughters. It’s a line you don’t cross.

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Professors sometimes say that Othello is living out a racist fantasy – a violent black man kills an innocent white girl. But when I was playing him I never really saw it like that. The emotions in the play were so much stronger for me: the fear and jealousy, the anguish and anxiety. In the course of his life, Othello has seen so much. And I’m part of the generation of South Africans who feel we’re lucky to be alive. Whenever I play Shakespeare, I keep thinking, “how did this Englishman know so much about me?”

John Kani is in Kunene and the King at the Swan theatre, Stratford upon Avon, on 23 April

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