Othello

Italian actor Luigi Lo Cascio is best known for his remarkable career in film, which began in 2000 with Marco Tullio Giordana’s biopic of Peppino Impastato, a lone mafia fighter in the small town of Cinisi, in The Hundred Steps. However, Lo Cascio’s passion for acting began in the theatre, a medium that pushes actors to find their own physical and verbal language. In several interviews, he has commented on how, per force, film flattens expression and uses a more quotidian language that takes poetry away from actors in order to leave it to directors and cinematographers. After having played several Shakespearean characters on stage, in 2014 he decided to adapt Shakespeare’s Othello in Sicilian dialect, writing an original play, which he also directed and acted in as Iago. The adaptation is motivated by an understandable desire to make the classic text speak to a twenty-first-century audience, while the choice of a language that few understand is determined by its rawness and implicit poetry. Sicilian is immediate, expressive, and apt to convey emotions that standard Italian turns into literary language. Lo Cascio’s Othello creates an original mixture of contemporary and timeless concerns in an original play about the impossibility of men and women to understand each other.

—from “Crimes of Passion: Lo Cascio’s Otello, a Sicilian Shakespearean Moor,” by Gloria Pastorino