Othello

Abstract

Centaur Theatre has bitten off quite mouthful by attempting an Othello in this their second year of productions…The company has brought in two outsiders for the occasion—John Juliani, the young Montrealer who achieved a certain degree of notoriety on the West Coast last year with his theatrical activity and who also directed the production by Centaur last season of the show based on the Sir George computer incident; and Robert Kya-Hill, a young American Negro actor who has had some experience in the theatre… Kya-Hill has a wonderfully resonant voice which he uses with discretion in the first scenes of the play. It is obvious that this is intended to indicate inner strength. But there is more to vocal characterization than that and the actor has not even begun to scratch the surface of the role. We jump without reason from quiet calm to hysteria and a kind of rug chewing that one would not have seen 150 years ago, at the height of romantic theatre. The others in the cast are still reaching for their concept of the play just as the director is still not quite certain about the shape the performance should take… The costumes and the sets are functional, the lighting attracts attention to itself too often and the gimmicky bit about intermissions and half-intermissions is just a conceit. (Jacob Siskind, The Gazette, 19 November 1970)