Press

Disappointment awaits anyone expecting the definitive underwater Othello, or the Moor’s sea battles represented by dazzling feats of synchronized swimming. Instead the Kiev company Theatre-on-Podol brings a radically re-interpreted but formally conventional modern-dress Shakespeare into the strange late night ambience of an old-fashioned swimming pool. It would take a genius of a director and huge resources to possess this space entirely. The Ukrainians sometimes seem to be struggling to incorporate the setting into the reading of the play. The swimming pool itself has its big moments, for example as the swamp in which Othello rages, chest deep in jealousy and foreboding, but more generally it works as an ambiguous connecting symbol, as a source of innocence (through which Desdemona swims on her wedding day) and of oblivion, into which people and objects are constantly thrown. This is bold and gut-felt Shakespeare that emphasizes the sad, competitive machismo of the play’s world but fails to convey the physiological sore-spots.