VERDI BELIEVED wholeheartedly in the Furies. In Il trovatore, the characters are tormented by a malevolent doom that pervades the universe; in La forza del destino, the same malign force pursues people across continents like a disembodied medieval Terminator. Opera, the morbid recreation of Greek myth, was a good career.In Iago, Verdi found a character to incarnate the world’s motiveless horror, and his (and librettist Arrigo Boito’s) creation is closer to the Devil than in Shakespeare. Iago slips away at the end, as ungraspable in body as in the power of his evil imagination. Boito gives him a soliloquy of utter nihilism; created in the image of an evil god, Iago believes man “the sport of black fate from cradle to grave”. Or does he? As writer and director of the