Othello to open in Newcastle ahead of UK tour
Northern Stage co-production
A new production of Shakepeare’s Othello, set in the early 1980s against the backdrop of the Falklands War, is to open in Newcastle in September ahead of a national tour.
It’s a Northern Stage co-production with HOME Manchester and Glasgow Citizens Theatre, in association with Royal & Derngate in Northampton.
It is to be directed by award-winning Anthony Almeida who is as well known in opera as in theatre circles, having won the European Opera Directing Prize in 2022.
According to the creative team, this “bold new production reframes Shakespeare’s Othello as a tragedy of assimilation, asking: ‘What do we become when belonging depends on performance?’
“This dynamic staging examines the everyday negotiations that hold communities together until they quietly begin to tear apart.
“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.”
In the title role will be Dwane Walcott, who has a list of notable stage appearances to his name, including a production of A Streetcar Named Desire staged in London and New York and various Shakespeare productions.
On TV he has been seen in shows such as Saviour and Believe Me on ITV, A Town Called Malice (Sky Max) and, on the BBC, Enterprise and Our Girl.
Iago will be played by Maanuv Thiara while Phoebe Smyth, a recent graduate of London Academy of Music & Dramatic Art, is cast as Desdemona, Othello’s maligned wife.
Also in the cast are Rebecca Banatvala (Emilia), Grace Hodgett Young (Bianca), Chris Garner (Brabantio), Will Stanton (Cassio) and Matthieu Sys (Roderigo).
Othello is often said to be a play about jealousy (stirred up by Iago who makes Othello doubtful about his wife’s fidelity) but Anthony Almeida suggests 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.”
Othello opens at Northern Stage on September 11 and runs until September 26. Tickets from the Northern Stage website or call the box office on 0191 230 5151.
It then tours to HOME, Manchester (September 30 to October 10), Royal & Derngate (October 13-17), Theatre Clwyd (October 20-24), Citizens Theatre, Glasgow (October 27 to November 7), Derby Theatre (November 10-14) and New Theatre, Peterborough (November 17-20).