Chiwetel Ejiofor

At the end of “Othello,” as Desdemona lies smothered on the conjugal bed, the warrior Moor turns to his assembled officers with the full knowledge that the deeds of valor which won him fame as a general for the Venetian state will forever be overshadowed by his mad gesture of jealousy. “I pray you, in your letters, / When you shall these unlucky deeds relate, / Speak of me as I am,” he says. “Nothing extenuate, / Nor set down aught in malice.” He invokes his love for Desdemona, insisting that his psyche was “perplexed in the extreme” by Iago’s wily manipulations, and then he tells one final story, from his time in Aleppo, when he came upon “a malignant and a turbaned Turk” who was beating up a Venetian. “I took by th’ throat the circumcised dog,” he says. “And smote him—thus.” On the word “thus,” to illustrate both his heroism and his odium, Othello stabs himself. He is killing, his story makes clear, both the foreign emotion of jealousy (“the sun where he was born / Drew all such humors from him,” Desdemona says earlier) and the foreigner in himself, his sense, as a black man in a white world, of being perpetually other. Still, Othello’s tragedy lies not so much in the obvious externals of racial difference as in an overwhelming sense of his own unworthiness, which lies hidden beneath his heroics. “Rude am I in my speech,” he says at one point, in the presence of Iago, offering both Iago and us a window into the self-doubt that will be his undoing. For all his accomplishments, Othello cannot believe that he is truly lovable to a white woman.

Among recent memorable Othellos, Laurence Fishburne, the first black man to play the role on film, was fierce and smoldering, and Sir Laurence Olivier—black-faced and eye-rolling—almost camp (“Desdemon day-ud”). In Michael Grandage’s thrilling new production (at the Donmar Warehouse, in London, until February 23rd), Chiwetel Ejiofor, a British-born actor of Nigerian descent who made his name as a screen actor—in Stephen Frears’s 2002 “Dirty Pretty Things” and Ridley Scott’s “American Gangster” (2007), among other films—brings to the character a natural nobility and a decency that are a kind of poetic revelation. (Tickets to the highly praised production, which sold out, have gone for as much as fifteen hundred dollars.) Although the script insists on the difference in age between Othello and his beautiful young bride, Ejiofor is only thirty-three; yet he has a gravitas that gives him a sense of seniority, and an ease with himself that is almost aristocratic. When he says, “I fetch my life and being / From men of royal siege,” you believe him. He parses the Shakespearean verse with an African lilt, which, while it retains the familiarity of the music, continually reminds the audience that a foreigner is speaking. His brilliant attack on the role lacks the usual histrionics and hand-wringing; as a person, his Othello is centered, keenly intelligent, charming, and calm. “I saw Othello’s visage in his mind,” Desdemona (Kelly Reilly) tells her father, Brabantio. When Ejiofor’s Othello is reunited with Desdemona in Cyprus, he sweeps her up in his arms with an excited flourish. “O my soul’s joy,” he says, and we feel all of it—the excitement, the appetite, the solace of connection.

Ejiofor gives as eloquent a shape to heartbreak as to love. When Othello asks for “ocular proof” of Desdemona’s transgression, Iago (Ewan McGregor) describes the finagled handkerchief on which Cassio, he claims, has mopped his beard. “O monstrous! monstrous!” Ejiofor says, shaking his head, in a quiet voice that has had the life knocked out of it. He expresses the exclamation points in the text not with his voice but with his body, which is suddenly still, the image of a stunned psyche overcome by trauma. Faced with the intolerable, Ejiofor’s Othello falls into a fit. Because he is so sympathetic and poetic, the madness of his jealousy seems all the more tragic. Othello emerges from the fit enraged; his annihilating anger, however, can never quite wipe out the memory of his love. Even as he bends to murder Desdemona—a scene that Dr. Johnson said was “not to be endured”—he is compelled to kiss her. “One more, and that’s the last,” he says. “So sweet was ne’er so fatal.” When, minutes after her death, Othello learns the truth from Iago’s wife, Emilia (Michelle Fairley)—“Moor, she was chaste. She loved thee, cruel Moor”—Ejiofor’s instinct is, again, not to rant but to freeze. It’s an electrifying moment: Othello is struck dumb with a grief beyond words.

As Desdemona, Reilly has a luminous, almost ethereal charisma. Her delicate alabaster profile plays potently against that of the sturdy bearded Ejiofor. At once tender and knowing, Reilly acts with a genuine light in her eye and kindness in her heart. She has backbone and her own brand of modest bravado. When Cassio (the compelling Tom Hiddleston), Othello’s beloved lieutenant, is manipulated into a drunken brawl by Iago, he begs Desdemona to intercede on his behalf with her husband, who has demoted him. “My lord shall never rest,” Desdemona tells Cassio. “I’ll watch him tame, and talk him out of patience.” And so she does. “Excellent wretch!” Othello says, conceding affectionately to her wish, adding, “When I love thee not, / Chaos is come again.” When chaos does, of course, come, Reilly is able, in the muted and moving lament of the Willow Song, to make Desdemona’s stoicism and her goodness shine through her bewilderment at Othello’s abuse. Desdemona remains loyal to her last breath. When Emilia asks, “Who hath done this deed?” Desdemona cannot bring herself to name her husband as her killer. “Nobody,” she says. “I myself. Farewell.”