Press

The trouble with transgressions is that if people commit them all the time, they soon cease to be transgressive. There may have been a time, in Fringe theatre, when the sight of a man climbing into a woman’s underskirt and smearing on lipstick was enough to provoke gasps of fascinated excitement; now it’s a cue to curl up for a quick snooze until the company thinks of something more original to say. In other words, the theatrical rhetoric of men-finding-the-feminine-in-themselves is becoming exhausted; which is maybe why the most exciting piece of theatre I’ve seen on the Fringe all week is a blazing Ukrainian assault on the text of Shakespeare’s Othello, which arrives at Infirmary Street Baths absolutely unencumbered with western reservations about machismo and its implications. Theatre on Podol’s Iago – for this is a back-to-front version of the play – is one of those only-in-Edinburgh events whose improbability fairly blows the mind; the ingredients in this case being the district councillor who fell in love with On Podol on a city-twinning visit to Kiev, the company itself, which was penniless, bold and game for anything, and an old Victorian pool off South Bridge that becomes a rippling, magical world apart under the influence of a bold sound and lighting design. But the striking thing about the production, apart from its inspired use of water as a Mediterranean landscape, and immersion in it as a symbol of sensuality and vulnerability, is the way in which it wrenches a piece free of its mortal moorings and converts it from a good man destroyed by an evil one into a fierce Darwinian drama about a weak man destroyed by a strong and cunning one. Heaven knows what anarchic ugliness in post-Soviet society has generated this passionate, reactionary hymn to the survival of its fittest, but there’s a furious force behind it; the piece is dominated by the huge figure of Anatoly Khostikoev’s Iago, who radiates ruthless animal energy like a furnace. I don’t know how well Khostikoev acts; the long dialogue sections of the play, without translation, certainly drag a little. But like Dolly Parton – of whose attempt at Shakespeare’s Juliet it was said that she sure could lean over a balcony – the mighty Khostikoev sure could pick up a tiny Desdemona like a piece of thistledown, generate erotic energy around her like static lighting, and make a bigger splash than any actor in Edinburgh when he finally tumbles like a great oak into the water, dragged there by the dying Othello. Theatre on Podol is also performing A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Pleasance, of which more next week. But from its Iago, expect no moral comfort; just a stunning reminder of an energy that we ignore at our peril.