Why The Greatest Devils Are Just Human

Having barely started rehearsals as Iago, Yalin Ozucelik could really use a hanky. He and the rest of the cast in Artistic Director Peter Evans' upcoming production of Othello (starring Ray Chong Nee in the titular role) for Bell Shakespeare are a ways off getting the third act of Shakespeare's tragedy up on the floor, but Ozucelik's been struck down by a bout of flu doing the rounds of Sydney.

"It's a bit annoying just at the start of our rehearsals to be under the weather, it's not easier when you're not feeling too well. In some ways it's perhaps better that it happens now than later in the middle of the run."

"I think he is very much human, driven by human passions and human drives, human feelings."

The middle of the run, which starts July in Orange before snaking around the country, wouldn't be until somewhere around late August, perhaps during stints in Perth or Hobart. But Ozucelik is no stranger to long productions, having played Poins in Bell's four-month long production of Henry IV in 2013, and a six month tour back with La Boite's production of Margery & Michael Forde's Milo's Wake in 2002 — at the time it was the longest national tour ever by a Queensland production.

"Every show is different, though of course, and the role of Iago is quite a big one," says Ozucelik, somewhat understating the significant size of the role, even with the cuts made by Evans.

There's no shortage of theories proposed for the infamously ambiguous incentives that drive Iago's sinister scheming — jealousy, fear, a toxic combination of ego and near-psychopathic indifference, an unacknowledged and unrequited homosexual love… The key to the character, says Ozucelik, is a degree of humanity.

"In the early days people certainly attempted this portrayal of Iago as evil incarnate, a subhuman, devil-type character. But I think he is very much human, driven by human passions and human drives, human feelings. Coupled with this idea of him being human, it doesn't mean that he's a good or decent human. He ends up being quite nasty. But I think that's fuelled by some deeper passion and emotional drive than just evil. He definitely knows what it is to fear or to love or to feel envy, those sorts of things, so I think that makes for a richer character, and in his soliloquies you get a sense of that.

"In some ways he's very intelligent, he's a very good manipulator and a very good improviser, essentially. Intelligent as he is, there's also a strange sort of pettiness, or foolishness, because as clever as he is he's not this exceptional mastermind, maybe he thinks he is, but he's actually not; actually, he has to work quite hard. Sometimes he has a bit of luck on his side, and that makes him more human, but it also makes everyone else seems less idiotic. Because one of the things that can happen if Iago is super-intelligent and he's got everything worked out and is so easily able to manipulate Othello particularly, then Othello comes across as foolish and the scale of the tragedy is lessened. If Othello is not as foolish, if Iago has to work particularly hard to make it happen, it's all the more real in the minds of Othello, of the audience, and the tragedy is greater."