L'Odeon
The Theater was beautiful
The audience
Bird's Eye
I sat on the first balcony level, right underneath where this photo was taken from
The entrance
My French friend Baptiste who I met at UC Irvine while he was on a year abroad works as an usher in a theater named L'Odeon. He knows me and my Shakespeare fixation pretty well so when they started showing "Othello" he offered to get me a complimentary ticket. On the night when I was set to go the trains from my suburb all decided that they would be "supprime" or canceled. Great. Luckily I was waiting for the train with another teacher who was headed my way. He took me on an alternate route; the next best option that we had and my only possible chance of showing up remotely on time. After taking a bus and three different metros I showed up at the entrance of the theater nearly twenty minutes late. This is France. I should not have been so worried. I just barely missed the beginning. Twenty minutes late!!!
The show was three hours long with no intermission and completely in French. I knew all of this ahead of time and was a bit intimidated by this daunting task. I was totally surpirsed by how closely I was able to follow the play. It was very hard to follow the language yet I was able to recognize most of the famous lines even in French! It helped that I had done the play in undergrad as I was able to follow all of the action and I knew the arcs of the characters ahead of time. The set and costumes were very bizarre. They were a minimalistic grayscale cross between the Matrix and Star Wars.
This didn't however stop me from being moved. It was superbly acted and the story is classic Shakespeare, love, honor, duty, hate, revenge, deception, double crossing, lots of blood, and a sprinkle of comedy. Oh boy! My heart soared just sitting back and watching it all unfold. I feel that not being able to understand most of the language helped me enjoy the story much more. I was able to pay much closer attention to Shakespeare's mastery of moving the action forward, pushing the characters at each other, and bringing it all to a boiling climax. What magic! I can't wait until the next show...
