The text message with my e-ticket for Shakespeare’s Globe’s latest show in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse called it Othello 2024, and director Ola Ince has made it very contemporary. The action has moved from Venice to London then, not Cyprus but Docklands, and General Othello is now a Detective Chief Inspector with the Metropolitan Police in charge of an operation against a drug cartel with text alterations being made to match that and cuts, some of them surprising. The performance still runs at three hours but it has a pace and energy that is continually engaging.
Incident room sequences at times frustratingly seem to offer a crime story that is never played out, but the picture of institutionalised racism is graphically presented with colleagues making a barrage of racist remarks on their radios.
The topical updating isn’t Ince’s only innovation. Ken Nwosu’s Othello is his public face, but he is accompanied by Ira Mandela Siobhan, identically dressed, as Othello’s subconscious, showing what is going on in his head. At first, what we see is a controlled façade, the efficient professional and captivated lover, but his inner self is struggling to deal with prejudice and is susceptible to his sergeant Iago’s insinuations, though later the subconscious becomes more like a conscience, the struggle with Othello’s jealous anger made physically manifest.
Ralph Davies’s Iago seems to be everyone’s best mate and Othello’s friend. He doesn’t use soliloquies to share his base plan with the audience, but as he dupes Desdemona-desiring Roderigo to provide funds, they can see the irony of everyone calling him “honest Iago”. It is clear that his wife Emilia isn’t so taken in, but she is trapped by her situation. As played by Charlotte Bate, you feel this sensible woman might put two and two together any moment.
The production opens with a non-verbal enactment of Othello’s courtship of and marriage with Desdemona that places a particular handkerchief as part of the plot. It is not lit by this theatre’s usual candles but by artificial light through a trap above, electric torches and by crime-scene strip-lights. Later, the candles and raw flame will largely take over, and strangely that doesn’t seem odd. Is that because it is what we expect here or is there a subtle connivance? It certainly matches the way that the story gets more murky, and Rennel Shaw’s music also takes on a different tone.
Desdemona’s dad, Cassio, whose promotion has made Iago jealous, even Iago’s wife all work for the Met. Only Sam Swann’s naïve Roderigo, who here becomes something of a clown figure, Cassio’s lover Bianca (Maggie Musgrove) and Desdemona herself seem to be civilians.
Poppy Gilbert’s Desdemona is a confident, modern woman, admiring of her husband and understanding the pressures upon him but instinctively reacting when borders are crossed and he hits her. Her husband isn’t the warrior hero who has been through 16th century tribulations, but he has been shaped by our own times and so has she.
This Othello 2024 underlines they way that 400 years ago, Shakespeare was raising questions about attitudes to race and the treatment of women while presenting a picture of a man whose reactions reflect the way he has been treated. Its division of Othello into two doesn’t entirely work but provides some intense theatre. Nwosu and Sibhan make a remarkable partnership.