We’re getting ready to welcome Othello to our stage this Autumn!
This co-production led by Northern Stage with HOME Manchester and Citizens Theatre, in association with Royal & Derngate Northampton, takes a fresh look at Shakespeare’s iconic tragedy – set in 1980s Britain amid widespread rioting and the backdrop of the Falklands War – and premieres at Northern Stage (Fri 11 – Sat 26 Sep) before heading off on a UK tour.
We caught up with Othello’s director, Anthony Almeida, to get his thoughts on the show.
How do the key themes of Othello resonate with audiences today?
More than four hundred years after it was written, Othello still feels uncannily close to us. Not because it gives us answers, but because it asks us to look more carefully. At how we behave. How we belong. And how easily the worlds we build together can be sustained, or quietly undone.
Why did you choose to set this reimagining in the early 1980s?
Shakespeare made theatre about the world around him. We wanted to do the same.
The Britain of the early 1980s is a country in transition. Institutions still carry enormous authority, but the world around them is changing. It’s a society where professionalism, appearance and belonging matter deeply, making it a compelling home for Shakespeare’s story. The play’s conflict between Venice and Turkey over Cyprus also finds an unsettling echo in Britain’s own military and political climate.
How do you hope the show will look and feel on stage?
From the beginning, we asked how performance, design, movement, music, sound and light could work together to create one living world. Not a collection of separate ideas, but a single experience.
We hope you don’t simply watch this production, but find yourself inside it. Sharing the same space. The same tension. And, ultimately, the same questions as the people on stage.
A secret marriage.
The brink of war.
Fact and fiction.
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 this iconic tragedy – as much about love as it is about hate.
“Chaos is come again.”
Book your tickets for Othello at Northern Stage now.