This week Othello, the jewel in the Crucible Theatres 40th birthday season, opens to the public. It’s star casting that’s made the production such a hot ticket with Dominic West and Clarke Peters from cult TV series The Wire reuniting to take the two leading roles. However, there’s another crucial cast member without whom there would be no stage on which to see these big names act.
In a nod to the Crucible’s origins on this big birthday, current Artistic Director and Director of Othello Daniel Evans has invited Colin George the founder and first Artistic Director of the Crucible to play Brabantio. I spoke with Colin in a break before the company’s first dress rehearsal and asked him what it was like to be back on the Crucible stage after all these years…
‘Quite unbelievable really, mainly because a lot of people thought it [the Crucible] wouldn’t last when we opened it.’ Ironically it was the now much vaunted thrust stage which made some doubt the theatre’s longevity. ‘People were afraid of it’ Colin tells me, disbelieving that any audience would put up with an actor turning his back on them. Of course after 40 years the Crucible’s stage, now listed, is one of it’s greatest assets, the horseshoe of stalls creating an intimate experience for every audience member even in an auditorium of over 1000 seats.
Despite the naysayers, the Crucible opened in 1971 with an ambition to produce first class repertory theatre with classic texts and new writing as well as children’s shows. Children were a keystone in Colin’s vision for the place, ‘any young person in Sheffield should have the opportunity to see the great plays here.’ He wanted them on the stage as well as in the audience, Fanfare – a piece performed by young people and reimagined as Fanfared in this 40th birthday season – was the very first thing on the great thrust stage, ‘even before Ian McKellen’ says Colin. Children were also a means of developing audiences beyond the middle class S7,S10 and S11 demographic of the old Playhouse, still an ambition of the Crucible today.
When I ask whether he thinks this ethos has been carried through to the current regime of Daniel Evans and Dan Bates, Colin says, ‘they’re doing exactly what we tried to do when we started.’ He has great admiration for Daniel Evans’ leadership at Sheffield, ‘he’s the right person in the right place, not someone with one eye on the National.’ Colin remembers seeing Evans in his first acting role as the boy in Henry V at the RSC and later worked with the him in Coriolanus. I speculate that Daniel Evans might find it rather intimidating directing one of his illustrious predecessors, ‘not in the least!’ says Colin, explaining that Evans is a generous director with an actor’s empathy, ‘I watch him directing and he’s in every scene, as Desdemona is getting strangled, he’s suffering too. He goes through it all!’
It’s not just Evans but the whole company that Colin enjoys working with, saying that after a long stint doing his one man show about the Quaker George Fox it’s rejuvenating to work with other actors. Despite not having seen much of The Wire Colin’s not immune to the star dust of the two leading men, ‘When I told my children and grandchildren I was working with Dominic West and Clarke Peters my stock rose.’ Of West he says, ‘he’s a lovely man but on stage he’s so easily evil… I feel almost frightened at points’, an emotion that will be familiar to anyone who saw his chilling performance as Fred West on television recently.
Colin’s part Brabantio is more ambivalent, as Desdemona’s father and a Venetian elder he welcomes Othello to his house as a guest but is repulsed by the thought of him as a son-in-law and furious at his daughter’s disobedience. Colin has taken his line ‘treason in the blood’ as a key phrase and likens Brabantio to another part he’s played Polonius – a statesmen who wished he was a warrior and a father with no idea of his daughter’s intelligence. ‘I’m playing him as a very unsentimental angry and upset old man….I have to give the actress playing Desdemona a hug when I come off!’
When I ask what audiences can expect from this production of Othello he says, ‘Well I’ve been riveted by it’, apparently staying long after he is needed to watch the rehearsals. In an attempt to pick out stand out performances he names nearly the whole cast and concludes that this Othello cuts through the melodrama of the story to really move the audience.
As we leave the room we’ve been talking in he notices he notices the plaque on the door saying, ‘The George Room’, ‘they should rename it The Colin George Room!’, a quip from from a man with no such vanity but only a sense of pride that the Crucible and its unusual stage is still going strong.
Othello runs at the Crucible until 15 October. Tickets 0114 249 6000.