“So much ado, so much stress, so much passion and repetition about a handkerchief,” lamented Thomas Rymer in his 1693 essay A Short View of Tragedy, demanding to know “how it entered into our Poet’s head to make a tragedy of this trifle”. Director Richard Twyman resoundingly answers the question with this thrilling production in which Othello is a Muslim living in the deeply conservative, racist and misogynistic Venetian state.
He wears a cross – he has to in order to survive and advance – but he has had to suppress part of himself. He ties the handkerchief, his link to his past, around his beloved Desdemona’s wrist as they whisper the words of an Islamic wedding ceremony.
Twyman not only makes a very good case for this play at this particular time, but he also does it with a cast who relish the language and negotiate the galloping storytelling with ease. Newcomers Abraham Popoola and Norah Lopez Holden are outstanding as the doomed lovers: she as open and joyful as a bubbling brook; he only able to express his true nature under cover of darkness in the marriage bed.
As Iago, Mark Lockyer is horribly good, the chatty, reasonable chap down the golf club, whose alternative facts seem so very plausible.
Twyman plays with light and darkness, appearance and reality, in an evening in which tragedy springs from the blindness of a state run by sleek-suited, microphone-hugging men confident about who is one of us, and who isn’t.
“O, these men, these men!” cries Desdemona. You can’t help but weep with her.
- At the Factory theatre, Bristol, until 1 April. Box office: 0117-902 0344.
