Othello – Shakespeare’s Globe, London

Writer: William Shakespeare

Director: Ola Ince

Sometimes updating old plays makes them sing in exciting new ways, and brings out timeless truths as pertinent today as they were four centuries ago. Sometimes it makes excellent plays into a clunky parody of their classic status and makes fine actors wrestle with shocking rewrites. Ola Ince has previous with the Globe, her 2021 production of Romeo and Juliet on the main stage grinding to a halt every ten minutes so surtitles could reassure the audience about the mental health of doom-laden teen sweethearts and offer warnings about the dangers of knife crime. This time, in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, a Metropolitan Police task force has taken up a watching post in Docklands under the command of Detective Chief Inspector Othello, Scotland Yard and Chelsea do service for Venice, and the cast are all warring police officers in stab vests and prominent side-arms.

Their base seems to be accessible to a wide variety of sweethearts and acquaintances, unable to live with the pain of separation caused by the vast distance between Chelsea and Canary Wharf. The references are frequent, clunky, disorientating, and silly. There is a utility in bringing plays written long ago into the twenty-first century, but there are dangers too. Everyone has seen enough crime drama to have a concept of undercover police operations. No one could possibly look at the set-up for this Scotland Yard incursion into Docklands’ dodgy drug deals and find it plausible. Audiences know more about the now than they do about Venetian colonial armies occupying Cyprus, so a playwright writing about colonial Cyprus is freer to make stuff up. Ola Ince’s made-up stuff is nonsense.

In the midst of this gimmicky re-imagining, there are some really good performances. Ken Nwosu is a powerful presence as Othello and speaks the verse beautifully. Ralph Davis plays an Iago who could be in a Guy Ritchie film, but that’s a contemporary reference that actually illuminates the character, and also fits into his director’s vision very neatly. Poppy Gilbert is Othello’s new bride, Desi. She threads an impossibly tight needle to make her character both feisty, and ultimately beaten down by her husband’s irrational accusations, and she is affecting and relatable. Charlotte Bate brings a grounded reality to Iago’s wife Emilia, and provides, in her last act outburst of fury and despair, a superb emotional climax to the play.

There is a very fine company working on this production, hampered by gimmicky conceits and awful cloth-eared rewritings of Shakespeare’s verse. It isn’t bad practice to re-imagine Shakespeare. It’s bad practice to make a wonderful play into a silly one.

Runs until 13 April 2024