OTELLO, DI PRECISE PAROLE SI VIVE

After 24 years, Lella Costa and Gabriele Vacis bring their Othello back to the stage. Shakespeare's masterpiece becomes a contemporary tragedy.

"It happens with great authors, perhaps especially with Shakespeare: their texts, their stories, their characters are, literally, immortal. They continue to speak to us, to amaze us, to enchant us; sometimes they even help us understand who we are, what is happening to us now.

And when you come across one of these perfect stories, you usually fall in love with it. And above all you realize that it would make no sense to try to invent another one to say the same things, but it is legitimate, perhaps even a duty, to continue telling that one. Precisely that one.

This is what happened to Gabriele Vacis and me, and not just once. 

This is what excited us so much that we decided to bring our Othello back to the stage, after 24 years, preserving the narrative essence (Shakespeare), but intervening and modifying those parts where current events – or rather contemporaneity – required an update. Those parts where the Bard himself enjoyed inserting allusions and quotes that are incomprehensible to us (who on earth is that “Signor Angelo” who influences even the Doge?), but which were undoubtedly clear and probably quite amusing to audiences of his time.

If we then add a striking plot, which could sound like a news today (a highly qualified foreign worker, a mixed marriage, a cunning manipulation, a deliberate and unscrupulous use of language, a femicide followed by the culprit's suicide), then we realize how much we need to keep telling and listening to this story.

This one, precisely."

Lella Costa