Theater: Another Othello

A shade over six feet tall and able to look taller, Philip Merivale has a deep, rich voice which wraps itself expertly around the most ponderous periods. He has a self-confident way of handling capes, cloaks and togas. His grave, bony face seems as incapable of timidity as it is of humor. He has beetling mobile brows and eyes whose whites can gleam with tragic fury in a sepia-colored face, as they did last week in Manhattan when Crosby Gaige opened his production of Othello, with Mr. Merivale playing the stout-hearted Moor whom jealousy made mad.

This is the first of eight Shakespeare plays docketed on Broadway for this season, including Producer Gaige’s Macbeth which follows Othello, Leslie Howard in Hamlet, the Lunts in The Taming of the Shrew,*Katharine Cornell again in Romeo & Juliet. Such able actors and their enterprising producers are currently creating something of a Shakespeare revival and proving that senescence is no proper criterion of ability to interpret the Bard that his plays are not only fine literature which can be declaimed with distinction but meaty melodramas which can be acted with vitality. Miss Cornell’s glowing performance last season showed her audiences not only a new Juliet but virtually a new play. Few months before he appeared as Othello in Central City, Colo. last year (TIME, July 30, 1934), Walter Huston read the play for the first time, made of the Moor a fiery and plausible modern hero.

Mr. Merivale’s Othello is somewhat less violent, a little more gentlemanly, than Mr. Huston’s. For the most part he speaks his lines with precision and touches of old-school austerity, but bursts now and then into roars of epileptic passion which old-school critics deprecated as inarticulate. Desdemona is played with competent verve by Gladys Cooper, the Jane Cowl of Britain who first appeared in the U. S. last year in The Shining Hour. Kenneth MacKenna provides a jaunty lago who obviously relishes discussing his skulduggery with himself and his audience.

*In one of the Shrew’s furious scenes last week in Philadelphia, Lynn Fontanne Lunt tore a cartilage in her knee, played the rest of the week with her knee in a tight bandage.