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Nothello @ Belgrade Theatre

‘More effing M-words’ shouted out a disgruntled audience member during the closing scene of Othello, reacting to Emilia yet again referring to Othello as ‘The Moor’. ‘He’s got a name!’ the young man shouted. A steward attempted to intervene: ‘That’s enough.’ ‘I agree!’ countered the heckler. ‘You’re ruining it for everyone else’, the steward admonished …

Mugen-Noh Othello @ Shizuoka Performing Arts Centre

Some fifty years after the events of Othello, a wandering traveller called Waki arrives in Cyprus, which is now back under Turkish control. By beginning this Mugen-Noh rendition of the tragedy at a point when the deaths of Othello, Desdemona and the rest are almost out of living memory, director Miyagi Satoshi adds a further dimension to the …

American Moor (Red Bull Theatre) @ YouTube

I’ve had the pleasure already of reading and loving Keith Hamilton Cobb’s American Moor, but the opportunity to see the man himself perform the play via Zoom is too fantastic a one to pass up. In the space of digital theatre, a play that is so concerned with presence and gaze and disparities of experience …

Emilia (Shakespeare’s Globe) @ The Vaudeville Theatre

Emilia’s transfer to the West End, after a short but impactful run at Shakespeare’s Globe last summer, felt like a triumph even before the show opened. A new play on a seventeenth-century female poet, commissioned for only eleven performances at the Globe, doesn’t tick the obvious commercial boxes, but Morgan Lloyd Malcolm’s text captured something …

Othello @ Shakespeare’s Globe

A lot of the commentary around Claire van Kampen’s new production of Othello at the Globe has concerned the laughter being aroused by the production; and, as ever, this commentary roughly takes two different angles. Is the laughter part of a company strategy that is deliberately mining the comedy in the play? Or are the …

Othello (Everyman Company) @ Liverpool Everyman

Liverpool Everyman’s repertory company’s second season brings together a single ensemble for a wonderfully eclectic group of plays – including A Clockwork Orange, Paint Your Wagon and The Big I Am. Othello, perhaps surprisingly, was the smallest scale of the three productions, performed by only eight of the ensemble in the round on a relatively …

Othello (Shakespeare Theatre Company) @ Sidney Harman Hall, Washington DC

Much has been made of the casting of an actor of Pakistani descent, Faran Tahir, as a Muslim Othello in Shakespeare Theatre Company’s new production. Artistic Director Michael Kahn, in the production’s programme, suggests that this is a first for the company, and draws specifically on the fallout in the Middle East following the collapse …

Othello (RSC/Live from Stratford) @ The Broadway, Nottingham

With the exception of the German production that played for four nights during the Complete Works Festival, it’s been well over a decade since Othello was last on the main stage at the RSC. Of all the plays deemed controversial, from The Taming of the Shrew to The Merchant of Venice, Othello is the one …

Othello (National Theatre) @ NT Live

When digging out my ticket for the NT Live screening of Othello at Nottingham’s Broadway, I had to go into my archived email from four months ago. Booking for these screenings has become even more competitive, and as I tweeted afterwards I was disappointed to see so few young people in the audience. The extreme …

Macbeth (Sheffield Theatres) @ The Crucible

Daniel Evans has been bringing tragedies annually to the Crucible in Sheffield, with a Hamlet in 2010 and last year’s Othello. That production was solid if flawed, traditionally staged but elevated by certain strong performances. It’s an assessment that might be directly transferred to Evans’s 2012 offering, Macbeth. Staged fully in the round and with …