Internationally recognised art and literary critic, writer and cultural producer. Published in ELLE, Glamour, Esquire and Cosmopolitan; member of the Union of Writers.
Othello, HOME, Manchester | ★★★★★ Directed by Anthony Almeida. At HOME until 10 October 2026.
A period setting earns its place when it changes what we understand about a play. In Anthony Almeida’s Othello, the early 1980s give Shakespeare’s hierarchies a powerful organising structure. Moving from England to the Falklands, the production brings questions of authority, national identity and the pressure to conform into the same charged space. Who gets to belong, and what must they surrender to remain?
Its strongest idea is that Othello’s military authority and his personal security are dangerously different things. Dwane Walcott’s general can command the institution without being able to trust his place within it. Assimilation offers power, but requires continual proof of worthiness. The tragedy develops in the gap between the rank he has earned and the acceptance that rank cannot guarantee.
Cassio’s demotion makes the hierarchy brutally physical. Ordered to remove his own stripes, he must participate in the dismantling of his identity. Military procedure gives way to a horrifying cry as the man crumbles. Iago’s “Are you hurt?” lands with unexpected force: the injury is psychological, and we have just heard its depth. The cold, officious return to business makes the exposure more upsetting still. This is where Almeida’s close rereading of the text pays off: a staging intervention releases fresh meaning from an apparently straightforward question.
The relationship between Maanuv Thiara’s Iago and Dwane Walcott’s Othello gives that psychological violence a more insidious form. There is genuine intimacy here, trust and love through which Iago’s suggestions can enter. Walcott makes the changing of a mind painfully legible. He throws off jealous thoughts, resists their implications and takes pleasure in his wife’s vitality: her wit, her dancing, the qualities he loves. Each affirmation has conviction. Yet doubt returns, finding purchase in an inward uncertainty that Walcott allows us to glimpse beneath the general’s authority. The infection grows through the effort to resist it. His tragedy acquires a devastating personal dimension as we watch him struggle to sustain a belief in the love he already has.
Phoebe Smyth’s witty, independent Desdemona is essential to the production’s force. Her capacity to choose and challenge gives the marriage a life worth defending. As suspicion takes hold, the frightening development is the erosion of her right to explain herself. Othello increasingly treats her words as evidence for a verdict he has already begun to reach.
The replacement of the Willow Song with “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” brings the production’s political argument into its most intimate territory. Heard here, the familiar song acquires a particular cruelty. The desire to rule has reached into the relationship that should offer refuge from the public struggle for power. Its Eighties provenance does real dramatic work: the period’s popular language becomes a way of hearing the catastrophe gathering around Desdemona.
Rebecca Banatvala’s Emilia, equipped as a soldier and protector, further complicates the relationship between gender, duty and authority. Her position within this military world gives the question of loyalty an additional weight. What does service require when the men entitled to obedience become destructive? Speaking the truth means challenging the structure that determines whose account carries authority.
These women deepen the production’s inquiry into belonging. Their struggle to be heard exposes the violence of a world in which credibility is distributed by rank and gender. Desdemona can speak clearly and still be disbelieved; Emilia must confront the consequences of making herself impossible to ignore.
The historical framework remains supple enough to accommodate the characters’ contradictions. The setting establishes pressures under which people act, while leaving room for wit, affection, vanity and error. That emotional variety gives the argument its force: we can see what this order offers people, as well as what it costs them.
The result is a remarkably persuasive reboot of Othello. Its most telling images make public power painfully personal: a soldier compelled to remove his own stripes; a song about ruling the world carried into a woman’s private distress. Almeida finds a precise historical frame for a tragedy whose questions remain urgently unsettled.
Performance attended: 1 October 2026. Othello is a co-production of Northern Stage, HOME Manchester and the Citizens Theatre, in association with Royal & Derngate.
