Anthony Almeida’s new production of Othello relocates Shakespeare’s tragedy to Britain in the early 1980s. It is a production full of strong performances and interesting ideas about race, gender, belonging and intimacy. Yet while I admired much of the acting, I was less convinced that all of the directorial choices fully developed these ideas. For me, this was an engaging but uneven.
At the centre of the production are two excellent performances. Dwane Walcott gives Othello the authority and presence we expect of a successful general, while gradually revealing the insecurity beneath that confidence. This contradiction is what I found most interesting about Othello himself. How can a man trusted to command an army be so easily manipulated in his private life? The production suggests that professional competence and emotional security are very different things. Iago does not attack Othello where he is strongest; he finds precisely where he is most vulnerable: his marriage, his position as an “outsider”, and ultimately his belief that Desdemona could truly choose him.
Maanuv Thiara’s Iago was the standout performance of the evening. The difficulty with Iago is that if he appears obviously villainous, Othello simply looks foolish for believing him. Thiara avoids this. His Iago is persuasive, personable and at times surprisingly entertaining. Rather than forcing Othello to accept a fabricated story, he plants suggestions, hesitates and allows Othello to construct the story himself. We know he is manipulating everyone, yet his behaviour remains plausible enough for us to understand why the other characters trust him.
This becomes particularly effective with Cassio, played by Will Stanton. Othello originally chooses Cassio for promotion over Iago, so he clearly respects his ability and character. Iago’s achievement is therefore not simply convincing Othello to distrust a stranger: he manages to reverse Othello’s existing judgments. The loyal Cassio becomes a suspected traitor, while the treacherous Iago becomes his most trusted adviser. Once Othello accepts the possibility that Desdemona and Cassio are having an affair, almost everything they do becomes capable of confirming it. The tragedy becomes partly about how easily suspicion can distort our interpretation of evidence.
Phoebe Smyth brings warmth and vulnerability to Desdemona, while Rebecca Banatvala’s Emilia provides an important contrast. Their conversation about husbands, wives, fidelity and the unequal expectations placed upon women was one of the most thought-provoking parts of the evening. Desdemona remains idealistic about romantic love and loyalty; Emilia is much more conscious of the double standards governing marriage and sexual behaviour.
Here, however, I wanted the production to go further. Almeida’s staging draws considerable attention to the relationship between the two women, including extended moments of singing and dancing. I could understand their purpose: they create intimacy, give the women a private space away from the overwhelmingly masculine military environment, and contribute to the production’s 1980s atmosphere. Yet these sequences sometimes felt more stylistic than dramatically necessary. They created a mood, but did not always deepen the story.
More importantly, the production opens up fascinating questions about gender and marriage without fully developing them. Emilia and Desdemona’s conversation invites us to see the tragedy not simply as the consequence of one man’s jealousy, but as part of a society in which husbands hold extraordinary power over their wives’ reputations and sexuality. Both women eventually tell the truth, and both are killed by their husbands. That parallel is devastating. I would have liked the production to explore this more forcefully, rather than raising these questions and then returning to a relatively conventional telling of Shakespeare’s tragedy.
The production’s treatment of Othello and Desdemona’s interracial marriage also stayed with me after the performance. It reminded me unexpectedly of a recent American Economic Review paper, Who Marries Whom? The Role of Segregation by Race and Class, which examines how social exposure shapes interracial and interclass marriage. Othello almost begins where that question ends: Othello and Desdemona have already crossed a powerful social boundary and chosen one another, yet marriage does not make the boundary disappear. Iago gradually turns society’s doubts about their relationship into Othello’s own doubts about why Desdemona would choose him.
Watching this as a Chinese audience member added another layer for me. Discussions of interracial relationships in Western culture are often framed through Black and white experiences. Coming from a much more racially homogeneous society, I sometimes find myself asking where people like me sit within that conversation. I can understand Othello’s experience of being visibly outside the dominant group without assuming that his experience is also mine. Perhaps that distance is productive: the play made me think not only about Black-white relationships but, more broadly, about how race, culture, family expectations, and ideas of “who belongs with whom” continue to shape intimate choices. The production does not necessarily answer that larger question, but it certainly made me leave the theatre asking it
This is where Almeida’s description of Othello as a “tragedy of perception” feels particularly convincing. Othello appears supremely confident in public, yet becomes increasingly uncertain about whether he truly belongs in Desdemona’s world. The tragedy is not simply that he fails to believe the woman he loves; it is that he eventually believes other people’s assumptions about their relationship more than he believes her.
This Othello gave me plenty to think about after leaving the theatre, and its strongest performances, particularly Thiara’s compelling Iago, make its psychological drama convincing. I only wish some of the production’s additional ideas had been pursued with the same confidence. There is a more radical exploration of gender, marriage and belonging hovering around the edges of this production; I wanted to see more of it.
