Othello

It’s not just black and white.

Fear, passion and paranoia bubble beneath the surface of Othello and Desdemona’s newlywed life. 

Iago’s manipulations begin in whispers – and end in ruin.

Director Anthony Almeida's new production looks afresh at Shakespeare's iconic tragedy – as much about love as it is about hate.

“Chaos is come again.”

For centuries, Othello has been understood as Shakespeare's great tragedy of jealousy

Director Anthony Almeida believes we've been asking the wrong question...

Relocating the action to Britain during the early 1980s, the production finds a society in transition, where institutions still carry immense authority but the world around them is beginning to change. 

Against the backdrop of the Falklands War, Cyprus becomes an isolated military outpost where professionalism, appearance and belonging matter deeply, and identity itself becomes a battleground. Love, loyalty, race, class, gender and power are filtered through the everyday performances that allow people to belong - or leave them fatally isolated.

Director Anthony Almeida said…

“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 in order 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 in Britain during the early 1980s wasn’t about making Shakespeare contemporary. It was about finding a society where appearance, professionalism and belonging carry enormous weight. I became less interested in public politics than private intimacy; less interested in certainty than perception. Four hundred years after Shakespeare wrote it, 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.”