A built-in spontaneity

In British theater company Cheek by Jowl’s absorbing production of Shakespeare’s “Othello,” the actors dress in modern clothes, perform on a sparsely adorned stage and recite their lines as if they are thinking them up on the spot rather than resurrecting sacred text from a well-worn page. And when Othello has wrongly murdered his true love Desdemona and it all ends in tears, some audience members feel they have not merely witnessed but lived through Shakespeare’s tragic tale of sexual jealousy. It’s the kind of performance that can make a person just want to go away somewhere quiet to contemplate, to recover.

“That to me is the best possible reaction,” says 51-year-old director and Cheek by Jowl co-founder Declan Donnellan in the bar at the Odeon Theatre Nationale in Paris, where “Othello” appeared on tour last spring. The play will be presented at UCLA’s Freud Playhouse from Oct. 14 through 17 as part of the International Theatre Festival. “I would hope that when I made a piece of theater, people wouldn’t have much to say about it, really. The important thing is that when you see ‘Othello’ you are moved -- you’re taken to that place where you’re just that bit uncomfortable in your feelings.”

Donnellan knows that making an audience feel something -- especially about such a well-known play -- is easier said than done. Cheek by Jowl, which Donnellan founded with his romantic and creative partner, Nick Ormerod (who designs sets and costumes), has long been one of Britain’s leading independent voices in theater. Donnellan himself is a thinker wary of the idea that his job description requires him to interpret Shakespeare for the actors or the audience. The symbolism of strawberries on a handkerchief or the significance of costumes is delegated to his partner and is the last thing on his mind.

“I think it is a mistake to try and make art too interesting,” he says. “I think it should be alive, but a thing that’s alive is interesting. Like with really great comedy, you think you might die laughing; you think you might actually die. I love that moment.”

Donnellan went to law school as a young man and practiced law for about one day. “I got my wig,” says the director, alluding to the get-up still worn by British attorneys. “I just wanted the costume!” He looks back on this diversion with the bemusement of someone who now wonders why he wandered off the well-marked path to his destiny. But by age 23, he had worked up the nerve to start acting, and by 28 he and Ormerod had cofounded Cheek by Jowl. In addition to his theater work in English -- as well as German and Finnish, languages he does not speak -- Donnellan has directed operas and a ballet for the Bolshoi. He is popular in Russia and, despite speaking only a bit of the language, he feels an allegiance for that country that began as a romance for its literature and has turned into something of a real love affair.

“I can’t even say what specifically it is about Russia, except to say that I feel my least eccentric there,” he says. Above all, he says that he shares the Russians’ theatrical priorities, which stress the performance of the group, not individual actors. Donnellan directed a well-received version of “Romeo and Juliet” to Prokofiev’s score for the Bolshoi, in which he put the dancers in modern dress and asked the ballerinas to leave their toe shoes in their dressing rooms. “I asked them was this the first time the Bolshoi ballerinas were not on pointe,” Donnellan says, “and they said, ‘No, it did happen before, but that was in 1780, before there was pointe.’ ”

Donnellan directed Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” in London in 1986, when he cast an unknown Ralph Fiennes -- just out of drama school -- in the lead role. Well known for his work with young actors, Donnellan last year published “The Actor and the Target,” a book he originally released in Russian in 2000. The London daily Guardian called it “a gripping read, as acute about the psychology of lying as it is about the art of acting” and he has been described as a kind of Stanislavsky for the 21st century.

Donnellan wrote the book to help performers remove the psychological blocks that render them mannered and posed and suck the life out of live performance -- the things that happen when actors act badly. But “The Actor and the Target” is no more for actors only than “The Art of War” is reserved for warriors. The problem-solving advice in this book -- discover, don’t invent; see, don’t show; pay attention, don’t concentrate -- applies to anyone struggling to create something made of imagination and experience. “Imagination doesn’t come from a vacuum -- we invent the world we see,” Donnellan said between sips of tea that he did not order but was too polite to return. He was pooh-poohing, for instance, excuses would-be writers might use to not sit down and actually write. “Perfectionism in writing is a terrible thing. People say, ‘This doesn’t perfectly express what I mean.’ Get over it! Get as close to what you mean. That’s why people like Shakespeare are great writers, because they know that words don’t work. It’s knowing that the words don’t work that liberates you.”

At rehearsal

Donnellan’s rehearsals are strictly closed, but the actors say that a session might consist of talking through everything that is on anyone’s minds or doing simple physical exercises like walking across a room to iambic pentameter, having to reach the next person by the end of the line and turn on the first strong beat of the second line.

Nonso Anozie, 25, is the man Donnellan says was born to play Othello. His first job out of drama school was playing King Lear under Donnellan’s direction for a Royal Shakespeare Company project two years ago that included several other members of the “Othello” cast.

“He really doesn’t know how he’s going to approach a production from the start,” Anozie says of the director. Instead, they focus on defining the “stakes” for each character in a scene so those scenes can be played for all their emotional worth, allowing the production to, as Donnellan says, “burst into life.”

That afternoon, Donnellan and the actors had been discussing a scene in which Iago is ignored by Othello in favor of Cassio. “One of the things that must be at stake for Iago,” Donnellan says, “is that he might burst into floods of tears. It would be terrible for him if he cried. One of the things that’s at stake for all of us in our mad lives is that somebody will hurt us.”

Iago doesn’t cry in the scene, but that hovering rain cloud lends tension and a sense of emotional unpredictability -- the stuff of exciting theater. Donnellan says that knowing the stakes gives actors a frame within which they have freedom to express themselves; because of this “Othello” is slightly different every night, in ways that surprise both him and the actors. For one thing, while his work might appear to have been stylized, he doesn’t tell the actors to move their hands here or there, to stand on their marks. Certain moves are choreographed -- a slap, a kiss -- but not where they’ll happen on stage.

“It’s left to our imaginations,” says Ryan Kiggell, 26, who plays Cassio. “If he prescribes that for us, then we become like puppets, and it loses its heart.”

Donnellan says that the central path for an actor is to move from asking himself “How am I seen?” to “What do I see?”

“To be a good actor you have to be entirely, I think, in permanent struggle with your narcissism,” he says. In “The Actor and the Target,” Donnellan advises actors not to gaze inwardly for answers on how to see and reconstruct the world -- but to get out of the house. “It seems so safe at home, it seems so frightening on the streets, but this is a delusion,” he writes. “It is not safe at home; it is only safe on the streets. Don’t go home.”

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‘Othello’

Where: Freud Playhouse, UCLA, Hilgard Avenue at Sunset Boulevard, Westwood

When: 8 p.m. Oct. 14 to 16, 2 p.m. Oct. 16 to 17

Ends: Oct. 17

Price: $43 to $55

Contact: (310) 825-2101