Abstract
For those of us who did not understand Romanian, this Othello was an immersive sensory experience: with no mediating surtitles to distract us, we could let ourselves be carried along by the maritime soundscape of wind, waves and seagulls, the musicality of powerful voices, the eloquent body language and the visual effects, during a performance that lasted one hour and fifty minutes. The experience was rather like attending an opera with a knowledge of the plotline but no intimate familiarity with the libretto – or watching a ballet. The speeches sounded like arias, the outward-facing acting was emphatic, with balletic poses, when Othello (Liviu Cheloiu) lifted Desdemona (Andrada Fuscaş), or when she danced with other girls, and there were melodramatic moments, with much sword-swinging on Othello’s part. Indeed, Cheloiu’s performance was so vigorous that he broke his elbow that evening, but apparently only realized after the performance. Also operatic was the choric-like function of the cast which remained present upstage, in dim lighting, almost blending with the décor of pillars that was an unchanged feature of the spare design.
For those of us who understood Romanian, the experience was equally novel. There have been few productions of Othello in Romania (ten or so in seventy years). For this one, performed by a Romanian cast, the Armenian director Suren Shahverdyan used Valeriu Andriuţǎ’s Romanian translation of Boris Pasternak’s version of Othello, cutting the play by about one third. The overall result sounded somewhat archaic. This matched the atmosphere of what was meant to be a very Russian production, or rather, a romantic version of what Russian theatre is supposed to be. The overall style, right down to Othello’s trenchcoat, felt old-fashioned, especially to younger Romanians, one of whom described the performance as ‘an uncanny experience’, saying this was how she imagined the kind of theatre her parents would have seen in the 1960s – very likely the 1956 Soviet drama film directed by Sergei Yutkevich which this production somewhat echoed.
This powerful production addressed a real conflict between the generations and what they expected of each other. Cheloiu’s Othello was an ageing if physically powerful man, in love with a very young slip of a girl. Fuscaş’ Desdemona was a wide-eyed childlike figure, who loved playing on a swing and being told stories. She took Othello’s sword, removed the medal he wore round his neck, climbed on his back, mimed his way of walking, something Othello picked up in self-mockery, setting aside all idea of command and self-control one might expect of an older, senior military officer. The fact that Act 1 was cut meant that we never saw this Othello in a position of authority. And we never saw Desdemona mature into a concerned partner. The tragedy unfolded as a dance between the two of them which went from being sweet and naive, to being unsettling, and ultimately downright damaging and damaged. She was the adoring daughter and he was the impressive soldier father figure. Each time they came together, they tried to recreate their initial image of each other in an increasingly desperate way. It reminded some of us of Prospero and Miranda with the background sound of the sea and gulls.
The lighting design, which played on muted tones of blue and grey, combined with the sound effects to create the illusion of a cast stranded on the unstable deck of a ship at sea. A design of ropes reinforced the naval motif, but also literalised the rack of mental torture on which Othello seemed to be physically drawn in Act 3, with a rope round his neck and three ropes fastened to each arm. The pattern of ropes also resembled a cobweb in which Iago trapped Othello, whispering in his ear, kicking him to force him to the ground and even climbing on his back as seagulls shrieked in the background.
Othello’s isolated figure centre-stage, shackled by ropes, inevitably suggested slavery and people in bondage, inviting connections, for instance, with the Armenian genocide and, perhaps, the persecution of Jews: when, freeing himself of the ropes, Othello grabbed Iago and rolled them around his arms in turn; Iago’s Christ-like pose, arms stretched out, seemed to boomerang back on Othello, casting him in the cursed role of deicide. Nothing, however, was spelled out, leaving the audience free to create their own connections. This production’s agenda deliberately looked beyond a racialized identity of Othello that was erased, since the actor was not black, and no visual markers, whether in makeup, costume or props, pointed to an ethnic otherness. In a discussion, the director defended his choice in terms that startled some members of the panel: ‘Since the election of the president Obama, the racial question appears outdated for a contemporary adaptation’. The mutually damaging othering was created instead by the emphasis on the age difference. When Desdemona, alerted by Emilia, saw Othello in a fit, holding his head in his hands and appealing to the gulls to stop, she seemed unable to respond, as if permanently damaged by a relationship that froze her in childlike dependency.
In the final scene Othello avoided all eye contact with Desdemona. He kissed her to death in a scene reminiscent of Romeo and Juliet. Twice she rose to return in his arms, she kneeled before him, he lifted her up and, as the seagulls were heard again, laid her on the bed. He then removed the medal hanging round his neck, took his sword, struck the medal twice and killed himself. The play ended there, disturbingly, with no collective attempt at redemption.