Casting announced for Northern Stage’s new co-production of OTHELLO
Director Anthony Almeida’s brand-new production of Othello is a major new co-production between Northern Stage, HOME, the Citizens Theatre, and in association with Royal & Derngate.
Opening at Northern Stage on 11 September, with Dwane Walcott (A Streetcar Named Desire, Almeida/West End/ NYC) in the title role, this bold new production reframes Shakespeare’s Othello as a tragedy of assimilation: asking what do we become when belonging depends on performance? This dynamic staging examines the everyday negotiations that hold communities together until they quietly begin to tear apart.
Relocating the action 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 are filtered through the everyday performances that allow people to belong - or leave them fatally isolated.
Celebrated stage and screen actor Maanuv Thiara (Trigger Point, ITV) joins Walcott on stage as Iago, and recent LAMDA graduate Phoebe Smyth makes her professional theatre debut as Desdemona. Joining them on stage will be Rebecca Banatvala (Summerfolk, National Theatre) as Emilia, and Grace Hodgett Young 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, for which she also received an Olivier Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress In A Musical.
The cast features exceptional northeast actors Chris Garner (War Horse, National Theatre) as Brabantio, and Will Stanton who makes his professional debut as Cassio. Mattieu Sys completes the cast as Roderigo who was selected from an open casting call of over 200. He has been a long standing member of the internationally acclaimed theatre company Ontroerend Goed.
Director Anthony 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.”
The creative team is completed by designer Natasha Jenkins, sound designer Matthew Tuckey, lighting designer Sinead Mckenna, video designer Erin Guan, movement/fight/intimacy director Giaele Mattioli, and casting director Karishma Balani.
Following the run at Northern Stage this major new co-production begins a UK tour, visiting Manchester, Northampton, Mold, Glasgow, Derby, and Peterborough.