Falstaff's nose and the babble of green fields

Othello by Mikko Viherjuuri was not quite what I expected. It reminded me of why I don't go see plays much.

I don't get the overacting, especially when it isn't done all the way through. At times I was reminded of my favourite soapie, Days of Our Lives. If I want to see overacting, I'll watch that show. And they do it better yet!

The director explains in the programme that he had to translate the play into plain, unlyrical Finnish, because the play is notoriously "mythical" (tarunomainen) and wouldn't make much sense for most people. I don't understand his choice of term there, though I understand what he's saying.

But still, he left some key parts in the play "mythical", so as not to dampen their dramatic effect. I'm not sure what I think about those scenes. They went as over the top as Days of Our Lives, which I love to no end, so I suppose in principle I liked those parts. I guess my problem with it is simply the inconsistency.

The director also claims that de-mythifying the play has made Othello's character more believable. Not in my opinion. I couldn't understand how gullible he was. He was probably pathologically jealous and possessive is all I can think of.

I suspect it also made it harder to understand the characters because the director removed most of the monologues. That's how Shakespeare I suppose showed to the viewer how the characters' logic and thinking worked. Leave them out and you have far less to work from.

What's great though is that it made me realize how soap operas are actually keeping alive 400 years old dramatic traditions! So why are they looked down upon so much? Why won't so many people admit to watching them?

If you really think about it, it's not like they don't have depth of meaning to them. Just think about how everything happens in circles in soapies. The basic pattern is that people hook up, they fall out, they hook up again, sometimes with the same people and sometimes not.

Sometimes they die, and sometimes they come back alive. And again and again. It all reminds me of Samuel Beckett's play Waiting for Godot. In the play, two characters wait in the same nondescript place everyday for someone called Godot, but he never arrives.

They try to entertain themselves, but their days are pretty much the same. The play really has no ending or beginning because we start from the middle of their waiting, and stop before Godot has arrived. They'll stay in their circular existence for Godot knows how long.

Just like Vladimir and Estragon are doomed to do the same thing over and over, soapie characters are doomed to their lives of neverending drama and love triangles, quadrangles, whatever. I think Shakespeare would have approved, so why don't you.