‘All that fuss over a snot rag. Get over it.’ … please discuss. Why did Australian author Mark O’Flynn feel free to tamper with the Iago from Othello, who some say is Shakespeare’s most evil villain? This Q&A with O’Flynn takes you behind the scenes of how he wrote this brilliant story. Next week, I’ll reveal how actor Tim McGarry channelled the smarmy Dr Smith from Lost in Space to find just the right voice for his captivating performance of ‘Iago’—now an audio story available from Spineless Wonders.
You obviously had a ball creating your story ‘Iago’—and the language in the piece is extraordinary. How many of the delicious and onomatopoeic words you use in ‘Iago’ did you make up? How did this creative mind-blast work?
I think the only one I made up is ‘obfusconstumble’. I take as my precedent the fact that if Shakespeare didn’t have a word for something he simply made it up. For example, before him there was apparently no word for ‘eyeball’. Otherwise I use a bit of nominalisation, where verbs and nouns and adverbs are interchanged.
‘Iago’ is wonderfully theatrical. Tell us more about your theatrical background and how it helped with the development of this unique monologue and wonderful performance piece …
I first started writing for the stage under the misapprehension that because plays were easy to read they must be easy to write. After studying drama I worked in the theatre for four or five years. I still dabble but less frequently. I’ve drifted away from the theatre over the years. Because I didn’t think of Iago as a performance piece that allowed me to be as outlandish as I liked with the language.
As Spineless Wonders Publisher Bronwyn Mehan said in introducing ‘Iago’ to the online bookclub subscribers, your Iago is ‘a rather funnier, cruder and more manic version of Shakespeare’s character’. What prompted you to ramp up these aspects of Iago? How did you know you weren’t going completely over the top in a way that might alienate readers?
I did not know that. I just wrote down what he whispered in my ear.
Shakespearean critic AC Bradley said that ‘evil has nowhere else been portrayed with such mastery as in the evil character of Iago’ while critic John Draper says that Iago is simply ‘an opportunist who cleverly grasps occasion’. Having delved into his character to write ‘Iago’ … what sayest thou about his nature?
I must say I wasn’t thinking evilly when I wrote him. So I suppose Bronwyn’s descriptor of manic is closer to the mark.
Iago says of Cassio, ‘He hath a daily beauty in his life that makes me ugly.’ In 2002, Andy Serkis portrayed Iago at the Royal Exchange Theatre and wrote, ‘He’s you or me feeling jealous and not being able to control our feelings.’ Yes, no, maybe? Thoughts?
Yes, he’s like a naughty schoolboy who’d rather smash everything than let anyone else play with it.
‘All that fuss over a snot rag. Get over it.’ … Please discuss …
In the first production of Othello I saw, I remember thinking, ‘Really? All this angst over a hanky?’ It seemed absurd rather than evil. The snot rag is a nod to the earthy, plebeian language that Shakespeare is wont to use.
Last year, in an interview for A Bigger Brighter World, you said it was in high school that you asked of Iago and of the play Othello, ‘Well, what did he say next?’ You also said that you ‘read a very short story by Margaret Atwood telling Horatio’s version of Hamlet and my old idea came back. It also gave me an excuse to have fun with the Elizabethan language.’ Tell us more about how that fun played out … And also please tell us of any recent urges to ‘personalise a response to a famous story’ (to steal Lorrie Moore’s phrase).
I love old dictionaries and lists of archaic words. So any excuse to use them, might be a bit obscure, but also for a writer lots of fun. I once gave to Ned Kelly in a story the phrase ‘The feff of conskite …’ which is quite rude and probably wrong for the period, but greatly enjoyable. It’s supposed to make sense in the context of the story. I once took the lyrics of a song by Paul Dempsey (and I don’t know if that’s obscure or mainstream) and used them as the basis of a story.
What lines do you most enjoy now when you read the story? I am personally fond of: ‘… the Moor a-gurgle on the floor, all that claret on the carpet. My good lady wife squawking in the wings.’ / ‘She [Desdemona] was a good sort, luscious as a locust …’ / ‘Picture them in the cot, prime as goats, as hot as monkeys, as salt as wolves in pride, going like a gong in a storm. Going Hell For Leather!’
I do like ‘as salt as wolves in pride’, which is Shakespeare.
Perhaps one of the edgier couple of lines are, ‘Told you I was the jocular lad. Nice-looking sort—such a waste. All the fault of this so-called permissive society; the new world condoning old abhorrences such as mixed marriage, threesomes, foreskins, migrants and refugees intermingling with the rest of us.’ What’s the inference here?
That alludes to Iago’s views on race relations, which are not very PC, given what he says about Othello, views which are certainly not mine.
How tempted were you to insert a few of Shakespeare’s own lines?
Oh I did, I did.
Last time we spoke you were working on a dental tourism story. How’s that story coming along? What else are you working on (I know you don’t love that question … but I always really want to ask it!)
Don’t ask. … A recent story I’ve finished was about a project I conduct at work where I get inmates (I teach English and writing in a prison) who have children to read a kid’s story book, which I then send home to the child with the book, so they can listen to dad reading them a story. It’s a profoundly simple idea and was good to use as the basis for a piece of fiction.
Helen Elliot, from The Age said, ‘Iago’ is feisty, edgy and challenging writing that works superbly.’ Please tell book-clubbers a bit about two other stories in White Light that will tempt them to buy your wonderful short story collection and savour it as I did and still do …
‘About Stealth’—It’s essentially the true story of how the shooting location of a Hollywood blockbuster was transferred into the Megalong Valley near where I live. A friend of mine was involved with the fire brigade there and told me what he saw. Of course the characters I made up, apart from the name of the bad guy, which I lifted from a fellow who once wanted to beat me up.
And the character of the purse snatcher in ‘Lovely Outing’ was a student of mine who was mortified at the prospect of meeting his victim during a restorative justice session. Against the odds they became strange friends. I was interested in the challenge of writing through the voice of the little old lady, a character far removed from my experience, and trying to give her some dignity.
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