This sorrow's heavenly, it strikes when it does love.
ShakespeareBetween 1599 and 1608, Shakespeare produced seven tragic masterpieces. Othello, which probably dates from 1603/04, is the third of them, following Hamlet and immediately preceding King Lear. This terribly bleak drama is perhaps, of all those Shakespeare wrote, the one whose intrigue is the most mastered. Othello's voyage that leads him towards his destiny, beginning in Venice and ending in Cyprus, seems to drive him progressively towards hell, while the space all around him seems to be slowly shrinking, until it reaches the small dimensions of the bedroom where Desdemona is smothered. In order to follow the footsteps of a man as he is swallowed up into his own void, Éric Vigner's first step was to make sure he had a play that had been freshly reworked for actors such as Michel Fau and Samir Guesmi. This was because Vigner, who has always liked to move from classics to the moderns and enhance the dialogue between their respective qualities, has turned Othello into something resolutely contemporary.
In order to collaborate with him on this new version, he called upon Rémi De Vos. Their friendship goes back a good decade. Vigner has already adapted two of his works for the stage (including « Until death do us part », performed in Paris in 2007) at the Théâtre de Lorient that he has been directing since 1996, and where De Vos works with him as « associate writer ». Their new translation was terminated just before Vigner left for Atlanta, where he was going to direct a play by another Shakespeare translator: Bernard-Marie Koltès. And as soon as rehearsals began, when he started approaching one of his favorite playwrights in English, he was suddenly able to measure the full impact of « how plays communicate amongst themselves ». It seemed to him that Koltès and Shakespeare echoed one another, commented upon and dialogued with one another. « Two men who cross paths », writes Koltès, « have no other choice but to strike each other, either with the violence of enemies or with the gentleness of brothers» : when he found this line in Koltès's « In the solitude of cotton fields », Vigner was immediately reminded of that other « tale of Men » that is, Othello, where the Moorish general and his ensign Iago-the-demonic, confront one another.
Koltès and Shakespeare both have a strong sense of conflict and of war : Othello's backdrop is the Mediterranean where Turks and Venetians fight for supremacy, and in the shadows of the sea town that Othello-the-Berber serves, Koltès helps Vigner catch a glimpse of other States, establishing relations with their proper foreigners that are just as ambiguous... « Othello », Vigner concludes, « is a play from the darkness, where the question of desire, love and death, flow through a hypnotic atmosphere, just as they do in Koltès work... The very strange manner in which death works throughout this play will be sublimated by...nothing. What we see, is the desert. »
