Othello, National Theatre

My, but she takes a long time to die, Desdemona, twitching on her barrack mattress, doll-blonde and bare-legged, as her husband crushes the breath from her. Just when he thinks the deed is done, she splutters back to life, pleading. He could stop then, could maybe save her, but he’s gone too far, so he plunges on, laying his weight on her until she is still, his hands wrapped round her delicate neck. It’s awful and protracted and upsetting – as it should be – with Nicholas Hytner’s production making much of their physical disparity, the brutality of it: she’s so fragile-looking and exposed, in her knickers and the tiny child-like T-shirt she wears to bed, his muscled, uniformed form all but obliterating her.

It’s sexual too, all that writhing, there on the contested bed. Adrian Lester’s Othello doesn’t rape her, but there are intimations of reclamation in the methodical way he goes about putting out her light, still palpably, physically drawn to her, even when he his sniffing her sheets to detect traces of betrayal.

Hytner’s production is the third in a sort-of triptych, together with his Henry V(starring Lester) and hisHamlet (starring Kinnear) and it shares a similar contemporary earth-toned aesthetic. At its best it succeeds in saying some interesting things about the weaponisation of men in the military, with Othello, the career soldier, pinwheeling from love-struck to rage-fuelled in half a heartbeat, his jealousy so intense it makes him vomit. And though Iago tries to rationalise his hatred, it seems to spring from some deeper, primordial place, controlling him rather than the other way round.

With their faces close-cropped and deep shadowed, their eyes burning out at you, the NT poster campaign pits Lester and Kinnear against each other like prize fighters, the Rumble in the Olivier if you will, and it’s difficult not to look at it through this frame, though it seems reductive to do so as both performances are powerful, both rich in their own way. Lester’s Othello is commanding and full of fire – he has a voice you could warm yourself by and hulks out convincingly, flipping over a table with a flick of his wrist whilst roaring with rage – but it’s perhaps the nature of the play that Kinnear’s Iago is the more compelling figure (though it’s in no way inevitable that Iago should dominate – Chiwetel Ejiofor in the Donmar’s 2008 version remains one of the most intense, controlled Shakespearean performances I’ve seen), coming across as a bit of a bruiser, Phil Mitchell with added smarts, driven, cold-eyed and calculating but with a dash of the schoolboy in the way he air-punches and victory shimmies when he gets one over on the object of his malice. As with his Hamlet, Kinnear’s performance has a kind of ease to it, there’s a clarity of intention to his delivery, and he juggles the verse as if he spoke that way every day, though there are times when the mechanics of it all feel a bit too visible.

Olivia Vinall’s Desdemona fades into the background a bit, but that’s again perhaps a consequence of the role. (In making Desdemona an absence, The Q Brothers’ Othello the Remix – performed as part of the Globe to Globe festival last year – was one of the more interesting readings of this play and the placing of women within it). Lyndsey Marshal’s Emelia, while furious and forceful in her loyalty, seems a bit trapped in a role that feels particularly contradictory in its modern context.

For while the production’s military setting makes sense in terms of translating the hierarchies and power games – this man’s, man’s, man’s world – into a recognisable present, embroidered handkerchiefs aside, there are times when it feels a bit tired, a bit ‘done’, a rehashed Iraqistan which we’ve seen before and we will see again. It does at least allow for a great, lively and messy, mess-room scene - with a couple of bikini pin-ups the only thing to break up the bare walls - in which Jonathan Bailey’s Cassio is forced to chug down a lager fountain while being beerily cheered on by his fellow soldiers.

Vicki Mortimer’s flood-lit military base of a set is intentionally bulky and ugly, a transient space, devoid of home comforts, all concrete, harsh strip-lighting, and cheap plaster board walls: when Othello punches out in anger his fist goes straight through. Though there’s something a bit effortful about the set, with its numerous sliding panels allowing various bedrooms, offices and yards to emerge and retreat, its very blankness is an asset, for in this fenced-in place of sun and sweat and tension and little in the way of distraction which doesn’t come in a can, it’s plausible that here passions, jealousies, petty vendettas, could grow and spread unchecked like bacteria on a petri dish.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Greenland at the National Theatre

The polar bear is something of a lumbering paradox; it could kill a man with ease and yet it seems so vulnerable in its whiteness, a vulnerability that has only intensified as its Arctic habitat has come under threat. For this reason the bear, an animal both threatened and threatening, has come to serve as a easy symbol for the damage climate change seems likely to wreak on the planet, for all the things we stand to lose. So the presence of a polar bear in the National Theatre’s attempt to tackle the suject is not exactly surprising, is in fact pretty predictable, and yet this ursine cameo is handled so delightfully that its predictability is eclipsed.

The appearance of the bear, the work of Blind Summit’s puppet-master Mark Down, creates a moment of awe and wonder amid an otherwise noisy and tangled production. Greenland is issue theatre, or perhaps more correctly, Issue Theatre. It takes the subject of climate change and attempts to graft narrative onto it, to inject dramatic life into it. To do this the National has drafted in four writers: Moira Buffini, Matt Charman, Penelope Skinner and Jack Thorne. The production has a jumbled quality, a franticness, though it eventually becomes possible to tease out a number of distinct narrative strands: a young boy with a passion for geography grows up to lead an isolated life studying sea birds in the Arctic Circle; a young girl, much to her parents’ bafflement and dismay, drops out of college to become an activist; the most developed strand, set in the run-up to the 2009 Copenhagen Climate Change Conference, involves an ambitious political adviser and her burgeoning relationship with a scientist whose projected climate models present a bleak picture for the future of the human race. These stories are interspersed with other characters, other voices, the most interesting being a pair of delegates from Mali. Together they present a less familiar picture, that of a country already feeling the real effects of climate change, encroaching deserts and disrupted rain patterns. But no sooner have they said their piece than they are ushered to one side in a way which could, optimistically, be read as a comment on the general media coverage of the issues at hand. Bijan Sheibani’s production is certainly slick. That’s not intended as a dig; the staging is always visually striking and there are moments of real invention and magic: the polar bear, the silhouettes of swooping circling guillemots. At other times there is a sense of excess and repetition: first plastic bottles fall from the ceiling, then paper, and finally both rain and wind machines get a work-out. Music is used throughout; there’s a brief burst of It’s Raining Men and a rather heavy-handed dance sequence to the strains of Come Fly With Me, presumably intended to illustrate the irony of all the air travel that an event like Copenhagen entails. The obvious parallel is with Rupert Goold’s Enron - and the production’s dramaturg is Goold’s regular collaborator Ben Power. Yet while the markers of the musical, the air of showiness, felt like a bombastic but logical choice for a play about banking and commerce, they feel somewhat shoe-horned in here. There are some strong individual performances, particularly from the ever-watchable Lyndsey Marshal, and there are also a number of moments of genuine humour, yet the overriding tone is didactic and clichéd - the strand with the young activist is particularly limp - and the whole thing has a stitched-together quality This is one of a growing wave of plays about climate change. Richard Bean’s The Heretic (chosen promotional image: the polar bear) at the Royal Court looks set to cover similar ground while Steve Waters’ potent double-bill, The Contingency Plan, has already shown that’s it’s possible to merge gripping and plausible writing with the idea of a threatened world. Here, while it’s possible to glean the thinking behind the exercise, the weight of all the voices serves to sink things. Reviewed for musicOMH