Vegas: the city is a symbol of deliberate artifice, improbable luck and impossible ambition. Oasis in the desert, gambling mecca and iconic frontier boom-town, it hangs its neon lights, cowboy imagery and generalized decadence over Thomas Ostermeier’s “Othello”. The director of Berlin's Schaubühne theater has bet his reputation on contemporary readings of Shakespeare and Ibsen and he draws another ace with this production's setting clues; a menacing drive-by of blinking casino signs underscores the high stakes of Iago's political and sexual maneuverings and lends Othello the air of a blackjack rookie to his ensign's double-dealing croupier. In US Army dress whites, the Venetian officers look like freshly showered soldiers on furlough in Sin City; the combination is highly volatile, and Desdemona's murder the ineluctable and sordid jackpot when male pride and frustration cross paths with a capricious Lady Luck.

Ostermeier counters Shakespeare's many questions around jealousy, fate and passion with a production steeped in metaphors and contrasts, central to which are Desdemona's immaculate bed and the black waters in which it stands and where the actors splash, fall and risk drowning. Throughout, a live quartet on sax, trumpet, drums and keyboard  drives the unstoppable machine to its finish. The prevailing tone is meta-theatrical throughout, however, with the Schaubühne's troop, led by Stefan Stern's Iago, an electrified specter of calculating rage and volatile master of ceremonies, and Sebastien Nakajew's solid and utterly naive Othello, seated around the stage awaiting its cues.

If Ostermeier's tragic hero is white, Marius von Mayenberg's modern idiom bluntly states the racial issue, substituting "the Black" for Shakespeare's more ethnic and ambiguous "Moor". The label dryly condemns Othello of Desdemona and Cassio's murders in the final scene, his equal partner Iago retreating to salutary silence and the protection of his race.          

Disruption comes naturally to Ostermeier's approach to the classics; if he doesn't change interpretations of Othello's pride and fatal blindness, he shifts the context to another kind of desert storm that exposes any number of points of dispute in contemporary societies, from gender to race to power to sexuality. If Shakespeare were to take his seat at Caesar's Palace, who knows how the cards would fall, but against the Elizabethan belief in destiny, Ostermeier holds a post-modern hand: life is a crap shoot from which the only the coolest of temperaments emerge unscathed.

In German with French subtitles. To March 27, Wed-Sat, 8:45 pm, Sun, 5 pm, Les Gémeaux, 49 ave. Georges Clémenceau, Sceaux (92) RER B Bourg-la-Reine, 14-32 euros, tel: 01.46.61.36.67.

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