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Battling to survive ... Rory Kinnear and Adrian Lester in Othello at the National Theatre.
Battling to survive ... Rory Kinnear and Adrian Lester in Othello at the National Theatre. Photograph: Tristram Kenton
Battling to survive ... Rory Kinnear and Adrian Lester in Othello at the National Theatre. Photograph: Tristram Kenton

Green-eyed monsters: Kinnear, Sher and McCabe on the evil in Iago

This article is more than 8 years old

Iago is one of Shakespeare’s ultimate bad guys, but what is it that drives him – racism, sexual deviance, or even post-traumatic stress? As Othello is performed at the Royal Shakespeare theatre, three former Iagos – Rory Kinnear, Antony Sher and Richard McCabe – explain his psyche

Rory Kinnear (National Theatre, 2013)

With a lot of Shakespeare’s characters, something seismic has happened to them just before we meet them. Hamlet has lost his father. Angelo jilts Mariana in Measure for Measure. Iago suspects that Othello has slept with his wife. As an actor, you have to know who that character was beforehand in order to understand how they’ve changed.

Iago was a good egg: a company man, well-liked by the squaddies, funny, kind and generous. However, we meet a man who feels cuckolded. He’s not sure if it’s absolutely true, but he’s heard a whisper on the grapevine.

Nick Hytner’s first instinct was always to steer away from racism and examine that jealousy. Othello is a play with a pattern: Iago believes another man has slept with his wife, so he persuades that man that his wife has slept with another friend of theirs. It’s hard to spot because Iago always talks about it euphemistically, almost as if he can’t bring himself to say it out loud. It’s also hard to land that fact so early on in the play. His racism pings out.

It’s a very military play. Iago is a soldier through and through. His bond with Othello is abnormally strong. They’ve risked their lives for one another. He talks, early on, about not respecting Cassio because he’s never seen conflict: he’s a Sandhurst boy.

There’s a big shift in soldiers between life on operations and life on leave. You can be in the middle of something extraordinarily perilous or back in the barracks, kicking around doing nothing. In Othello, they’re all pepped up for battle in Cyprus and then that all fades away, so where does that energy and pent-up aggression go?

Iago is not a military strategist. He reacts to the lay of the land, how the battle looks in the instant. His first step is to wake Desdemona’s dad up and see what happens. Throughout his soliloquies, the word that keeps pinging out is “now”. This is a man working on instinct in the moment. He pounces on Cassio’s inability to drink and sets up the fight with Roderigo. He doesn’t suggest killing Cassio or Desdemona, but when Othello does, he goes with it. Everything’s opportunistic. It has to be. If you have someone who has planned it all out from the start, it’s dramatically inert.

You have to implicate the audience. They’ve got to squirm, not just over what happens, but because they did nothing about it. They had all the knowledge – this guy was not to be trusted – and they just sat there. People have jumped onstage to stop Iago, wrestled him to the ground. One actor in the 19th century was killed in the part, shot by an audience member. I’m glad that didn’t happen. Maybe I just wasn’t good enough.

Antony Sher (Swan theatre, 2004)

Antony Sher and Sello Maake Ka-Ncube in Othello at the Swan theatre. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/Swan theatre

Words such as “evil” and “villain”, they don’t mean much to me as an actor. They seem to hark back to a time when we knew nothing about psychology, and I’m far more interested in thinking about those people as damaged in some way that leads to their actions. In Richard III’s case, it’s easy to see: he’s a disabled man who has been severely mocked and humiliated by his disability. He tells us that in his opening speech. With Iago it’s subtler. He doesn’t explain himself, not even at the end. I’m not sure he can. The man’s a psychopath.

I think there’s something very wrong with him, sexually. He can’t open his mouth without sexual imagery pouring out – and it’s ugly, filthy language, as sensationalist and shocking as a tabloid journalist. People having intercourse is “making the beast with two backs” – that’s a very, very savage image.

We never pinned down exactly what was wrong, whether he’s impotent or sterile, but there’s a medical condition called morbid jealousy, where you become falsely convinced that your partner has been unfaithful. My instinct is that Iago suffers from the same thing.

We definitely wanted him to be racist. I was playing opposite a South African actor Sello Maake Ka-Ncube and we had both been brought up under the apartheid system. Racism was just second nature. It was simply what you were brought up to believe, that black people were inferior. I simply played that. Othello as my senior commandor was inferior just by virtue of being black. The fact that its second nature doesn’t make it any less ugly – it’s far worse that people can be racist without even stopping to think about it.

It certainly doesn’t stick out. Shakespeare shows how he appears to the world: honest Iago. You see how popular he is, how good he is at barrack-room banter, how he gets the drinks in and starts a sing-song. The audience alone get to see a completely different person at work: a very dangerous and damaged man, and you really start to fear what this man is going to do. Noone around him does, though, and his survival instinct is very strong – another sign of a psychopath.

Richard McCabe (Royal Shakespeare theatre, 1999)

Richard McCabe and Ray Fearon in Othello at the Royal Shakespeare theatre. Tristram Kenton Photograph: Tristram Kenton

Iago, for me, is a man with a serious inferiority complex and, at his root, sexual jealousy. I don’t buy Coleridge’s idea of motiveless malignity for a second. He has plenty of reason to do what he does. In his first soliloquy, he says, “the lusty Moor hath leapt into my seat, the thought whereof doth, like a poisonous mineral, gnaw my innards, and nothing can or shall content my soul till I am evened with him wife for wife.” That’s a pretty clear statement of intent.

The soliloquies are vital. Shakespeare always tempers his tragedies with comedy and Iago seduces the audience with these asides. In one he starts by saying, “Who’s he, then, to say I play the villain?” – an extraordinary line, the actor commenting on his part to the audience. They disappear as the play goes on. Iago dominates the first three acts, then sits back as his plans come to fruition.

The crux is Act 3, Scene 3. At the start, Othello is secure in his love for Desdemona. By the end, he’s ready to kill her. It’s so well plotted. There’s not a wasted word. We had a washbasin – Iago had been up all night – and, halfway through, Othello almost drowns him, furious at the suggestion against his wife’s honour. Minutes later, they were sealing a blood brothers-style pact, cutting their palms and shaking hands.

I wanted to find a moment of self-doubt. I’d read about a serial killer who had woken up one morning, looked in the mirror and realised his own lunacy before carrying on. I wanted a morsel of guilt. Iago walked upstage, back to the audience, and dropped his head into his hands, almost “What am I doing? What am I doing?”

That makes the last moment more interesting. He says he won’t ever speak of this again, won’t explain. At the last moment, being led off by guards, I turned around to look at the dead bodies with as neutral expression as possible. I was aiming for ambiguity, to leave it up to the audience. Some saw satisfaction. Some saw remorse. Iago’s an open book.

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