Shakespeare’s Othello is reimagined in 1980s Britain at HOME this autumn

Touching down at HOME this autumn, a brand-new production of Shakespeare’s Othello reimagines the great tragedy of jealousy from a new perspective.

Award-winning director Anthony Almeida believes we’ve been asking the wrong question of the work. Instead, he reframes the iconic tale as a tragedy of assimilation, asking ‘what do we become when belonging depends on performance?’, examining the everyday negotiations that hold communities together…until they quietly begin to tear apart.

Relocating the story 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 filter through the everyday performances that allow people to belong, or equally, leave them fatally isolated.

Almeida has garnered international acclaim for his bold reinterpretations of classic texts, and is the only director to have received both the RTST Sir Peter Hall Director Award and the European Opera Director Prize, as well as being nominated for the International Opera Awards’ Rising Star Award and The Stage Debut Awards’ Best Director.

Speaking about his take on Othello, Almeida said: “I don’t think Othello is really a play about jealousy. 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.”

You can read a full Q&A with Anthony Almeida here.

Dwane Walcott (A Streetcar Named Desire, Almeida/West End/ NYC & Our Girl BBC) stars in the title role, celebrated stage and screen actor Maanuv Thiara (Trigger Point, ITV & Boys on The Verge of Tears, Soho Theatre) joins as Iago, and recent LAMDA graduate Phoebe Smyth makes her professional theatre debut as Desdemona.

Joining them on stage is Rebecca Banatvala (Summerfolk, National Theatre & Prima Facie) as Emilia, and Grace Hodgett Young (Punch, UK Tour & Sunset Boulevard, West End) as Bianca, who, in 2024, won The Stage Debut Award for ‘Best Performer in a Musical’ and the ‘WhatsOnStage’ award for ‘Best Professional Debut’ for her performance in Sunset Boulevard.

Othello comes to HOME Wed 30 Sep – Sat 10 Oct. Tickets are on sale now. Book yours below.