Othello in the 1980s
Director Anthony Almeida’s new production of Shakespeare’s Othello relocates the action to the Britain of the 1980s, against the backdrop of the Falklands War.
The play is a co-production between Northern Stage in Newcastle, HOME Manchester, Glasgow's Citizens Theatre and associates Royal & Derngate in Northampton, and in our region will play Northern Stage from September 11-26; HOME Manchester (September 30-October 10); Theatr Clwyd (October, 20-24).
The play lands us in an isolated military outpost in which professionalism, appearance and belonging matter and identity becomes a battleground.
Almeida says: “I don’t think Othello is really a play about jealousy; jealousy is the symptom. The tragedy begins much earlier, in the tiny acts of adaptation, restraint and performance we all make to belong.
“I realised Shakespeare hadn’t written a play about jealousy at all; he’d written a play about behaviour. Once we began looking through that lens, everything changed."
Setting the play during the early 1980s wasn’t about making Shakespeare contemporary. It was about finding a society where appearance, professionalism and belonging carry enormous weight.
“The questions at the heart of the play still feel astonishingly urgent. They’re questions about who we become when we believe we have to perform in order to be accepted – and what happens when those performances finally collapse.”
Dwane Walcott Phoebe Smyth Maanuv Thiara
Dwane Walcott (A Streetcar Named Desire, Almeida/West End/ NYC and Our Girl, BBC) plays the title role; Maanuv Thiara (Trigger Point, ITV, and Boys on The Verge of Tears, Soho Theatre) is Iago, and recent LAMDA graduate Phoebe Smyth, in her professional theatre debut, plays Desdemona.
Rebecca Banatvala plays Emilia and Grace Hodgett Young (Punch UK tour and Sunset Boulevard, West End) is Bianca. Chris Garner (Coronation Street), Will Stanton and Mattieu Sys complete the cast.
More info here. Tickets: from individual theatres
