Chiwetel Ejiofor

What are the hottest tickets in London theatre? Patrick Stewart’s Macbeth, Ian McKellen’s Lear and what will now be known as Chiwetel Ejiofor’s Othello. For director Michael Grandage has done two unusual things in this admirable Donmar revival. He has made Othello the tragic focus of the play that bears his name. He has also, in an age of high-concept Shakespeare, come up with a refreshingly classical, aesthetically harmonious production.

Put the play into a modern, military setting, as many recent productions have done, and Iago instantly becomes its centre: one thinks of McKellen and Sher giving us variations on the malign ensign as barrack-room fanatic. But Grandage strips the play of naturalistic detail to give us a contest of character. In Christopher Oram’s fine design Venice is evoked through a ruined back-wall and water-filled gullies. Cyprus, in contrast, is all billowing canopies and iron-grilled windows penetrated, in Paule Constable’s brilliant lighting, by a fierce Mediterranean sun. Much as I’ve enjoyed radical takes on Othello, such as the savage rewrite Munich Kammerspiele brought to Stratford-on-Avon last year, it is good to see the play restored to its 17th century origins.

Ejiofor also puts himself into the front rank of modern Othellos. Agate said the three essential qualities for any Othello were nobility, temperament and the capacity to be pole-axed; and Ejiofor has them all. When he announces that he fetches his life from "men of royal siege" you believe him. He also reminds us that Othello’s tragic flaw is less jealousy than an excessive idealisation of his beloved. But what Ejiofor gives us, unfashionably, is Othello’s word-music. In his talk of "the spirit-stirring drum, th’ ear-piercing fife" he relishes the Moor’s self-conscious rhetoric. At the same time, Ejiofor has the modern actor’s ability to isolate key phrases so that his insatiate demand for "the ocular proof" of infidelity becomes a palpable sign of dementia. Ejiofor’s youth is at odds with the text’s insistence on Othello’s seniority. Otherwise this is a performance that, in its descent from majestic dignity to deluded rage, suggests a great and noble building being destroyed by the wrecker’s ball.

The ball in question, of course, is Iago, of whom Ewan McGregor gives a decent, robust, if insufficiently complex, account. Period costumes themselves obliterate distinctions of rank: McGregor, in his dark balloon-breeches, doesn’t look any different from his military superior, Cassio. McGregor’s great asset, paradoxically, is charm. But I never felt the actor gave us privileged access to what Hazlitt called the man’s "diseased intellectual activity." In place of Auden’s practical joker or the impotent obsessive imagined by many actors, we get simply an enigmatic destroyer.

This production dwells less on the motives than the appalling consequences of Iago’s action; and these are unforgettably registered in Kelly Reilly’s Desdemona. She gives us the character’s social bravery and loving nature but what I shall long remember is her vulnerability: when struck by Othello, she registers a shocked disbelief and she is incredibly touching in the "willow" scene. Michelle Fairley’s Emilia counterpoints Desdemona’s unqestioning love with her own sexual realism. But the real virtue of Grandage’s production lies less in devastating insights than in its ability to reveal the play’s tragic lineaments: as the spotlight fades on the intertwined bodies of Othello and Desdemona you feel that something of great potential beauty has been destroyed by the world’s ugliness.

· Until February 23. Box Office: 0870 060 6624