MEDIATHEK

Piece + Interview with Vladimír Morávek

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Iago's victory over Othello is partly due to the fact that Iago contrives to impose upon Othello his rhetoric and his language. In the second half of the play, Othello becomes infected not only with jealousy but with Iago's language as well. Othello is an account of the disintegration of a personality, which reveals itself in the disintegration of language. Othello's language, so majestic in the first half of the play, gradually falls to pieces after the third scene of Act Three, his sentences - formerly so easily, even magnificently overarching - gradually shorten until they collapse into incoherent exclamations and Othello's dislocated, repetitive and frequently melodramatic rhetoric puts the finishing touches to the picture of a man whose world has totally collapsed. The drama about the collapse of Othello is at the same time a drama about the collapse of his language.
(by Martin Hilský)

By comparison with Hamlet, also performed by the company from Hradec Králové, the director's [Vladimír Morávek] production style is less opulent; the interpretation maintains the author's [William Shakespeare's] contours of a story with a curved construction, but the composition is composed of capriciously shaded parts - the acts. From the moment Othello is convinced of Desdemonas's guilt, the style of the production is refracted in a way close to Expressionist films from the beginning of sound cinematography, or perhaps one should say, the behaviour of the eponymous hero is close to them.
(by Jan Kerbr, Divadelní noviny)

How they rehearsed Othello -
They had the first reading rehearsal and Bush talked again and again about war on all channels. They wre nervous and wondered if there would be another summer at all, if they would ever be able to perform the play that they rehearsed during those mornings. The planes flew from west to east across the skies each hour, a flock of silver phantoms in the spring sky. Morávek talked all the time about a great love whose destiny is to drink hemlock in gulps, but he was rarely listened to. Everybody had the Mladá Fronta Daily under the table and was following the wr. Somebody said it was a good war - and they understood. And somebody said it was a bad war - and the understood that too. So they were completely confused, they watched TV contantly, what the government would say, and the government quarrelled and played on their nerves and was silent like a big fat Buddha. And so they went to the confluence of rivers and there they read and re-read this play in which the general Othello always knows how to lead the fight but never how to forgive his innocent wife. And they started to wonder what was the truth and they could not agree about that.
(from the text published in the theatre playbill)

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11th International Festival Theatre Booklet Pilsen (Printed Edition)