Preview
EXIT OTHELLO
Rogues Theatre
Written by Clem Martini
Directed by Stacie Harrison
Runs until November 29
Vertigo Studio Theatre (Tower Centre)
It’s a tale of jealousy, lust – and arts funding.
In Exit Othello, Clem Martini’s political satire-cum-backstage farce, a regional Canadian theatre is trying to rehearse a big-budget production of Othello to open its swanky new venue, just as the word has come down that all government arts grants have been terminated.
What’s a company to do? Try to carry on bravely in the cause of art (or at least the cause of regional-theatre Shakespeare)? Or yield to the will of the newly installed government, whose philistine politicians think the theatre’s posh new space would be a lot more profitable as a casino?
To make things worse, the cast of the show is hardly the pull-together type. On the contrary, it’s a volatile mix of competing theatrical visions. Othello is an imported British ham of the Peter O’Toole variety, his Desdemona is the strident artistic director of a feminist collective and the guy playing Iago is a gung-ho avant-garde performer from a troupe called Angry God (any resemblance to the late John Juliani’s Savage God is surely a coincidence).
And to top it all off, the company’s put-upon stage manager has finally snapped and started running about in a jealous rage, trying to kill the actors he’s convinced are sleeping with his wife.
It’s a crazy portrait of Canada’s theatre scene, all right – and one that was especially au courant when it was first produced in Edmonton in 1996. It’s inspiration, Martini says, was the lowbrow bombast of the then newly forged Reform Party, whose members were attacking arts subsidy as an unnecessary luxury.
"The rhetoric was – and perhaps still is – that arts funding was a kind of welfare and, were they elected, they’d simply cut it off," recalls the Calgary playwright, who is finally seeing Exit Othello produced in his hometown this month.
If Martini’s nightmare scenario has yet to come true, the kind of private-sector involvement in the arts that he imagined has already begun.
"We’ve seen a little bit of that happen since then," he says. "There’ve been all kinds of private models floated that the arts are supposed to aspire towards." And one has only to note the corporate logos plastered all over the former Calgary Centre for Performing Arts – now, of course, the Epcor Centre – to see that big business has become inextricably linked with culture.
"The thing is, sponsorship isn’t just money," says Martini. "That’s one of the things the play explores. There’s no purity once you take on a partner, once you privatize things. There’s always another agenda that comes along with that."
But Martini is an equal opportunity satirist and Exit Othello doesn’t just jab the politicians and capitalists, it also has fun skewering the backbiting behaviour of the theatre community itself. He says there’s as much professional jealousy and lust going on behind the scenes of his fictional company – the Four Strong Winds Theatre – as there is sexual jealousy and lust in the Shakespeare tragedy onstage.
"As this one theatre finds itself crippled and endangered, there are other theatres swimming around, thinking, ‘Wouldn’t this be a great space for us to have!’"
Exit Othello sounds like classic Martini – zany comedy with a twist of bitter truth – but, unlike most of his plays, it remained unproduced in Calgary until now. Rogues Theatre, the performing branch of the Company of Rogues acting studio, is giving the work its belated local debut. Directed by Rogues’ artistic associate Stacie Harrison, it features a cast of studio-trained actors and is being performed at the – yes, swanky new – Vertigo Studio Theatre.
"I hadn’t even thought of that, actually," says Martini, breaking into one of his explosive laughs as he realizes the irony.
He says it was Rogues artistic director Joe-Norman Shaw who initiated the revival when he came looking for some Martini plays the group could do. From the seasoned writer’s prolific output, Shaw chose Exit Othello and Selling Mr. Rushdie, another play that has never been seen here. Martini wrote them both for Edmonton’s Workshop West Theatre, where they were originally produced in ’96 and ’97, respectively. The Rushdie comedy – about a trio of hosers who try to collect on the Iranian fatwa against the famous author – will be staged by Rogues in March.
Although both plays were well received at Workshop West, they haven’t been picked up by another theatre until now. Martini says he may be partly to blame for that. "Truthfully, I’ve never been a person who was very successful at promoting their work. I write a play and I’m on to the next one very quickly."
And, typically, he has several new projects on the go right now. They include a prison drama commissioned by the Citadel Theatre in Edmonton (they obviously love him up there), a kids’ play for Calgary’s Quest Theatre and a trilogy of novels for young adults called Feather and Bone: The Crow Chronicles. "They look at the world through the eyes of a crow," he says. The first book will be published in the spring of 2004 and the Nelvana animation studios have already optioned it for a film. |
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