Christopher
Plummer has played almost every major Shakespearean role with distinction,
appearing with the Royal Shakespeare Company (Richard III, Benedick) the American
Shakespeare Theater at Stratford, Connecticut (Hamlet, Henry V/Chorus, Mark
Antony), the Stratford Festival of Canada (Leontes, Benedick, Phillip the Bastard,
Romeo), on Broadway (Macbeth and his Tony-nominated King Lear) as well as an
Emmy-nominated Hamlet for television that was actually filmed in Elsinore, Denmark.
His greatest Shakespearean success was probably his Iago, which premiered at
the American Shakespeare Theater at Stratford, Connecticut in August of 1981
opposite one of the great Othellos in history, James Earl Jones, and was universally
acclaimed as an even greater achievement that Jones' Moor. "Its most distinguished
and most painfully, playfully sustained vision comes with Christopher Plummer's
Iago," wrote Walter Kerr in the New York Times. "To be sure, Iagos
generally do run away with Othello. The part can be played in a dozen
or so ways, all of which seem to be good. But I have never seen it played this
way. When I speak of something 'painful' in this villan's slyness - 'painful'
even when he is dancing in glee about a Roderigo who might just go drown himself
- I mean to suggest that there is a curious quality in this too clever man that
could make you ache for him as he aches for himself. There is no obvious bid
for pity, or any sort of sentiment. Nothing like that. The surface of the role
is agleam with secret humor, with a liar's exhuberant delight in his ability
to fabricate tales so earnestly that he must be called 'honest.'"
The
production moved to Broadway the following February, only the second staging
of the play to reach the Great White Way since Paul Robeson's historic
record-setting appearance in 1943 (Moses Gunn played the Moor for 16 performances
at The American National Theatre and Academy in 1970). Again, Plummer
stole the show. This time Frank Rich wrote the Times review, "Mr.
Plummer, a sensational actor in peak form, has made something crushing
out of Shakespeare's archvillain. He gives us evil so pure - and so bottomless
- that it can induce tears. Our tears are not for the dastardly Iago,
of course - that would be wrong. No, what Mr. Plummer does is make us
weep for a civilization that can produce such a man and allow him to flower.
We weep because the distant civilization that nurtured Iago is all too
similar to the one that has given us a Hitler or two of our own."
The Jones/Plummer Othello played for 126 performances, less than half of the Robeson production but still the second-longest run of the play in Broadway history. It won the Tony Award for Best Reproduction of Play or Musical, while Plummer received a Tony nomination for Best Actor in a Play as well as a Drama Desk Award.