Word: desdemonas
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Joanna Pacula's friends among Warsaw's actors and directors know, of course, that she won't be back. There is a rueful quality to their recollections as they describe Desdemona in jeans and a sweater, a bruised angel with, as the speaker is likely to add, a will of granite...
...fall of 1981 she had been acting almost without a break since 1977. At 24 she had made nine movies, had played commedia dell'arte and Polish romantic stage literature for the Drama Theater, and had just finished taking the part of Desdemona in a TV production of Othello. She was at the top of her profession in a country where theater is taken seriously...
...when sets were inorganic pegs on which to hang the actors, rather than metaphorical expressions of a production's point of view. But then again, this production has no point of view. Director Peter Coe brings nothing but some undignified nose-rubbing to the tender relationship between Othellow and Desdemona...
...kiss fully on Rodrigo's lips and knife between his ribs (Plummer is a murderouly bisexual monster). Then there are images worthy of Halloween: Desdomona, tiny and exposed before her night table, singing a bed-time song, with Amelia's sudden entrances from the shadows creating delightful frissons; Desdemona draped horizontally across the bed as Othello enters to kill her, her long blonde hair hanging over one side, a delicate, bare leg over the other (Do all young wives sleep like that?); and, predictably, a subsequent stabbing and strangling both horrifying and erotic...
...supporting cast is uneven, Dotrice's Desdemona begins pallidly but grows in stature and Graeme Campbell is a robust and sympathetic Rodrigo when he forgets he's playing an idiot. But Aideen O'Kelly's Amilla is dowdy refugee form a detergent commercial, confusing ingenuousness with imbecility, and she is embarrassingly inadequate vocally in the last scene. And a special nod to Paticia Maurceri's grotesque, campy and mush-mouthed Bianca--the actress should be swiftly jettisoned...