Even Olivier was daunted by Othello. “I haven’t got the voice,” he told Kenneth Tynan. “Othello has to have a dark, black, violet, velvet bass voice.” By taking voice lessons, Olivier lowered his tone an octave. He studied “the gait of the barefooted races” and adopted a loose-limbed stride, “swaying on the hips on naked feet, the flowing movement of a giant cat”. He spent hours before every performance getting his skin not just blackened but burnished. Othello was “a mountainous challenge” and after every performance, he wrote, he felt as if he had been run over by a bus.
So you could say that Lenny Henry starts with every advantage, already possessing the basso profundo voice, the black skin, the towering bulk and commanding gait. Physically he is made for Othello, and we have Dawn French’s testimony (in Dear Fatty, currently the nation’s favourite book) that her strapping husband, whose arms can wrap around her easily — “no mean feat” — has mighty long strong legs and “appears to be made with RSJ [rolled steel joists] instead of bones”. But he has another mountain to climb — to banish the jovial comic who has hitherto wanted only to make us laugh, and hold the stage as a tragic, emotionally flawed and distraught figure. Plus the hurdle of learning to speak Shakespeare’s language from scratch.
So Henry, too, looks as if he’s been knocked down by a bus as he emerges from rehearsal in Clapham, South London.
You might suppose that after the enthusiastic reception for his Othello this spring, in Leeds and on tour, he might be blasé. He did not read them, but critics wrote of his “emotional dynamism”, his “authority” and “dignity”, and pronounced it an “astonishing” Shakespeare debut. They could have transferred straight to the West End, but Henry wanted to be present for the 18th birthday of Billie (his and French’s adopted daughter) and for the last night of the French and Saunders tour in New Zealand in August.
So the cast have been re-rehearsing their already successful production. Henry says that it is like reconnecting a house. “The foundations and structure are there, pile- driven deep into us, but the house needs rewiring. I’ve never done anything remotely like this,” he adds, “so the fear factor is high.” But it’s far more exciting, he has written in his blog, than any drug. “You get all the roller-coaster ride of taking drugs without the fallout of losing your house and alienating your friends. The curtain comes down, it ends, hurray. But while you are playing pretend, because that’s what it is, playing pretend, you go through an amazing maelstrom of emotional experiences.”
Those who are curious about Henry’s own hubristic moment, when his marriage hit a crisis in 1999, may read something of it in Dear Fatty. French writes frankly about her father’s suicide, her love for Henry, the “heartbreaking” trials of multiple IVF treatments that failed to produce a child (while their chums were blithely announcing their new arrivals), their ecstatic adoption of Billie, and how they repaired the brief fracture in their relationship — when Henry was 40.
The result is a 25-year marriage that is, in showbiz terms, enduring. Lenworth G. Henry is for her “the brightest, the best” and “the king of kiss”. He is also “a genuinely great dad”. Both are fiercely protective of Billie; Henry will not even say what she might do next, now that she is 18. Privacy is one of the reasons that the family moved to distant Cornwall.
Henry’s Othello is nothing to do with the “TV-stars take over West End” syndrome. It started two years ago, when the ingenious Simon Elmes, of Radio 4, produced a programme, Len and Will, in which Henry investigated why he was Shakespearephobic. Peter Hall, Judi Dench, Trevor Nunn and Adrian Lester were enlisted to show Henry what he was missing.
He had just completed an Open University BA in English literature, part of “trying to better myself”. He genuinely wanted to find out why he had been allergic to Shakespeare at the Bluecoat Secondary Modern School in Dudley, where they did Romeo and Juliet for O level.
Henry is the first to admit that this wasn’t his English teacher’s fault. “Bomber” Nash — who had an RAF moustache — was a booming-voiced former actor. He took the class to see Zeffirelli’s 1968 Romeo and Juliet, and even the toughest boy in the school cried at the end. “But the words were indecipherable to us, working class from Dudley. If you saw that on the telly you’d switch over and watch Rising Damp. We still didn’t think, that’s for us.”
Preparing for his degree he had seen Ian McKellen’s Coriolanus, Alan Cumming’s and David Threlfall’s Hamlets, but he hadn’t the vocabulary, he felt, to navigate his way through them.
In the second radio programme Barrie Rutter, the actor-director who founded the Northern Broadsides company in Halifax, gave him a masterclass, ending up with Othello’s final “Soft you; a word or two before you go” speech. It was a revelation to spend four hours on a single speech, line by line — “You never get that luxury of attention to a comedy script. Comedians are self-policing, you take care of yourself, mostly without a director” — and it was one of the best days of his life. “At the end, I looked up at Barrie and said, ‘D’you think I could do this?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, course you could’.” First, Henry did a workshop with students at Warwick University, where Rutter’s former wife Carol, the professor of English whose speciality is Shakespeare in performance, watched Barrie directing Henry with Conrad Nelson as Iago. “Broadsiders are consummate Shakespeareans who really know their stuff, and I was honoured and invigorated.”
Othello is never an easy role. It was a disaster at Stratford for John Gielgud — as Peter Hall said, “The animal wasn’t there” — and even Paul Scofield’s Othello was disappointing. Could Henry stand up to it? The Daily Telegraph critic had expected to be describing “a theatrical car crash”, but coud not praise him too highly.
Anyone who has watched the hilarious video clip of Henry on Parky, belting out falsetto hymns (as sung by the old ladies at his mother Winnie’s graveside), will know the amazing range of Henry’s voice. Rutter got him to pitch his voice even lower than normal. He learned not to slouch on to the stage in trainers — “You’re a general,” Rutter reminded him. “This was stuff I didn’t know, I’d never been to RADA, or Rose Bruford, where they know the hierarchy of king actors and spear-carriers. When the rest of the cast were learning all that, I was playing Battle Hill social club or Keighley variety club.”
One bit of business he had to learn was how to throw a knife at a board and get it in every time. A former policeman from Doncaster, the “second-best knife-thrower in the world”, taught him. “When Iago starts to plant his poison in the ears of Othello, Barrie wanted me to have an activity. So Othello gets a chance to show his martial ability: I’m a big galumphy bloke and I’ve never been in a fight, never done kung fu, so it was good to master a new skill — like Steve Martin’s rising-coin trick.”
He was determined to be word-perfect, going through his lines every waking minute; his blood pressure went up and he had insomnia. When he did sleep, he had every variation on the actor’s panic nightmare: being on stage without trousers or finding that when he tried to speak only birdsong came out or having no face. “Then Dawn came up to Leeds and said, ‘Here, have some camomile tea’, and really soothed me.” After opening night his blood pressure went down again.
The experience has given him a perspective on stand-up comedy. “Comedians say, ‘I killed the audience, we annihilated them’ — it’s become such an alpha-male relationship with the audience, so sexually predicated, that’s how they talk about it. I suddenly began to feel I didn’t want to be in that gang. It’s taught me a lot about being a comedian, actually. In a play like this you take the audience on a journey. I haven’t fallen out of love with stand-up, but when I go back to it I’m going to want to do a whole show, with a journey in it, rather than just a bunch of jokes. I like comedians who take you somewhere, like Richard Pryor did.”
Henry’s parents came over from Jamaica in the 1950s and he still has many family members there. “In Jamaica my mum was a higgler, selling produce in the markets. My dad grew stuff, my mum would sell it. They left an agrarian lifestyle for the industrial Midlands, and worked in factories.” He once watched his mother manning a massive machine, “punching out widgets from sheet metal. It was frightening, but I felt proud of her”.
At 50, Henry is amazed to find himself a Radio 4 addict. “If you’d told me at 20 that I’d be doing lots of work for Radio 4 . . . ” (At 20 he was the star of Tiswas on children’s TV.) Elmes also produced the series What’s so Great About . . . ? in which Henry took sacred cows such as Bob Dylan, whose songs he thought rubbish, Method acting and motivational speaking and allowed himself to be persuaded of their positive merits. In the next series he will examine maths (he never got to grips with the subject) and Samuel Beckett.
He has been offered more Radio 4 plays and other theatre plays, and non-comic films. In March he will take his MA in screenwriting. He’s on the brink of “an amazingly scary career thing”, he suspects.
He can joke about white actors giving their Othellos (“Olivier is great but you’re thinking, ‘Why does Olivier look like Viv Richards?’ ”) but doesn’t go along with Paul Robeson’s view that Othello’s colour heightens his tragedy. “The thing about Othello is he’s not tragic — he’s a mensch until III. iii — when it all goes horribly wrong. At moments he regains his sanity (I can’t kill her, she’s my wife, I love her) but then Iago, whom he trusts totally, rubs him till he can barely think straight.”
As for Shakespeare in schools, he’s now convinced: “They’re big universal allegorical stories about the things that matter, that connect us all, they should be in your DNA. Later on you can feather in the detail, discover how Shakespeare gives you the emotional weather, in the language.”
When he was doing his OU degree he heard A Midsummer Night’s Dream set in the Caribbean. “You got the flavour of Shakespeare in patois. And why not? Shakespeare’s for everyone, whoever you are, wherever you’re from.”
Othello previews at Trafalgar Studios 1, London SW1 (0870 0606632), from Friday and opens on Sept 18
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