Othello

Othello, easily Shakespeare’s most relentless and tightly compressed drama, a dark, brooding thriller. A rare chance for students across NSW to see this masterpiece live.

This innovative production combines Sport for Jove’s trademark textual clarity and storytelling with a powerful cast and design – a remote military base in an occupied country where a trusted soldier will work away at the certainty of his commander like an irresistible tide. Othello is saturated with references to water. Oceanic mystery is the poet’s chief imaginative device and source of metaphor in this study of marriage, love, sex, persuasion and the illusion of loyalty. No Shakespeare play is more moving or offers a more modern sensibility or X-ray of contemporary political tensions.

A General from ‘outside’ Venice, enlisted as a child soldier at the age of 7, now leads a Christian naval force in what appears to be a fully assimilated and enlightened racial environment – until his sexuality crosses a boundary that stirs latent hatreds and xenophobic fears of the ‘other’. Venice, a city resting precariously on its own watery grave, and Cyprus, a frontier surrounded by enemies and a hostile ocean, are the battlefields upon which family, love, community, trust, ambition and jealousy are put under the severest trial.