OTHELLO or an intimate ravage
DANIEL LOAYZA: For you OTHELLO doesn't really present a drama of jealousy...
ÉRIC VIGNER : What is happening in the play surpasses jealousy. For me, the principal couple is formed by Iago and Othello. They both are vigorous, pursue a career and share hopes... And then their ways part : Othello continues to rise up and Iago's suit to become his lieutenant is turned down - by Othello. The curtain rises after that particular incident. Iago, so far an ordinary man, transforms himself instantaneously, and I believe in an immediate metamorphosis. Hurt by what he feels injustice, this ordinary man, in a fraction of a second, singles out an inner calling, as mediocre as evil can be... Othello, he is "great of heart", and Iago will destroy that greatness. Iago also becomes the dramaturgic engine that Othello uses in order to move on. Othello uses Iago - maybe unconsciously, blindly - as if he wanted to go on a road of non - return... It's an intuition, but I have the feeling that Othello and Iago need each other.
DL: What are their motives ?
ÉV: The play often deals with "seeing" - a desire to see, an incapability, an impossibility to see. It's a paradox play, at any moment... If Othello doesn't want to see that Iago is deceiving him, than maybe because he wants to see something else. There is a dark side in him, like the blind dot we all have in our eyes. He searches for a revelation, something to do with his proper origin and the highest form of love - the unconditional...
DL: But love and the fact that he looks back onto his roots, doesn't he owe that to Desdemona?
ÉV: I think it is getting even more complicated... Right from the beginning I was intrigued with Othello's intimate foreign status. My work on KOLTÈS has probably left its marks. Othello is a hero from abroad. Him being a stranger, his difference, his "otherness", we can read it on his face, in the color of his skin. His ambition may be all the greater. With Desdemona he will get to know love, but in the first place, he succeeds his marriage to her as the daughter of a powerful Venetian Senator. It's a political move. And nonetheless, love will make him explore the deepest grounds of his own being,
"as low as hell's from heaven" he says at his arrival in Cyprus. He won Desdemona's love by telling her about his life which was based on always looking forward. In Cyprus he starts looking back to another world he left far behind. A fabulous, fantastic world, which he, even being converted to Christianity and tolerated by the Venetian society, never denied.
DL: The famous handkerchief proves it...
ÉV: The fabulous handkerchief weighs heavily... it was his first present to Desdemona, but what makes it so interesting is that he never before spoken of its importance : the interwoven foreign past... To loose the handkerchief, in his eyes, signifies that the two worlds can never be brought together, the present success and the stranger's past. The handkerchief's loss rips his life to pieces. It's a dazzling, literally blinding revelation...
DL: Iago is operating there...?
ÉV: Yes, Iago is the diabolic operator of this revelation...
But beyond his infernal action, there is a dimension he can't control. Othello doesn't yet measure unconditional love. He feels it, guesses its unreserved extent, but he doesn't see. As if he chose darkness in order to find the light.
DL: It seems to connect with KOLTÈS and DURAS...
ÉV: DURAS, I have worked on for years, she was fascinated by certain passionate crimes, the state of rapture they brought to light. I have the impression that Othello seeks a sort of enlightenment. Iago poisons Othello, that's right, he infects him with the doubt. But he chooses exactly the poison to which Othello will respond. In the third act this is coming out very clearly. Othello is the one who is asking, he pushes Iago to speak, and to speak on - as if he were asking for an even stronger dose...
DL: Does Othello really have the choice, not to go further ?
ÉV: Does he have a free choice? Maybe... In fact, it looks like the scene between Iago and Cassio. Iago is setting up a trap for Cassio: he offers him a drink. Cassio knows that he shouldn't drink, but he gives in to temptation. Once the poison is absorbed, Iago and the spectator know that it is only a question of time... Was Cassio free to choose? Or was he beside himself? Or as he says : "that we should with joy, pleasance, revel and applause, transform ourselves into beasts!" The alcohol (spirit) is Cassio's point of weakness; Othello's flaw is harder to define, but he has got one. It starts off as a fissure and, time passing, gives way to delusion, obsession, and finally murder...
DL: Wherein consists Othello's weakness?
ÉV: He is doubting love. He can't believe in it. Maybe because he is a stranger... after all Iago touches a point "Her will, recoiling to her better judgement, may fall to match you with her country forms, and happily repent." Why should Desdemona love a man like him? SHAKESPEARE often alludes to the mistrust of the opposite sex, to the insatiable feminine abyss... But in this play we find another aspect - Othello is unable to admit being loved. One cannot see oneself through the eyes of those who love... accordingly there must be something wrong, love can't be true, is too good to be true... and that leads to a fanatical, very self-destructive logic that finally kills all capacity to love.
DL: Such logic, is it a fatality of love?
ÉV: Maybe rather an intimate challenge, when love is accompanied by an unconditional request. Beyond that, there is what I call, the feminine part. A different, feminine, dimension I have also met in DURAS' writings. Desdemona is assuming that part and she, she is impeccable...
DL: How did you imagine the journey between the two faces of love?
ÉV: The play has two beginnings: the long prologue in Venice, covering the whole first act - Othello takes advantage from the crisis to obtain approval for his marriage - and the arrival in Cyprus of the second act - Othello is at the zenith of his career, the Turkish fleet has drowned in the tempest. Both exterior difficulties, the approval of his marriage and the war, resolved themselves. But, from that culminating point on destructive processes run their course. There is a rise and fall. One bright side, one dark side. The set I imagined should make them feel both, make it obvious that one side is always the reverse of the other. So we travel from black to white, from dazzling light to nightfall, obscurity, different ways to be blinded, to become blind, until we forget if it was darkness or light what blurred our eyes...
DL: Always the paradox...
ÉV: Yes, or the "indecidable": oscillating from one extreme to the other, twinkling, never fixing, between death and love... I think of the play's ending. Before Othello commits suicide, he speaks to the present men from Venice. He tells them the story of an "unbelieving" Turkish man, in Alep, who offended fellow citizens. He has hit him, just like now, he hits himself for all to see. It happens to be an extraordinary gesture: Othello, in order to end his life, is placing himself on both sides of the border between enemies, Venetians and Turks. The gesture which distinguishes vanquisher from vanquished allows Othello to identify with both. He thus identifies with the one he were and in a way never ceased to be - since, in the ultimate hour, he still needs to kill him, again and again, until the last instant of his life.