Northern Stage announces cast 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 & Our Girl BBC) 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 & Boys on The Verge of Tears, Soho Theatre) joins Walcott on stage 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 which premieres at the Toronto International Film Festival in September) 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, for which she also received an Olivier Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress In A Musical.

The cast features exceptional northeast actors Chris Garner (Coronation Street & War Horse, National Theatre) as Brabantio, Will Stanton whotrained at LAMDA and who makes his professional debut as Cassio. Mattieu Sys completes the cast as Roderigo, he 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.

Anthony 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.”

Fresh from the West End, New York and the National Theatre Dwane Walcott is a stage and screen actor who has performed in some of the UK’s most celebrated theatres. Recent theatre credits include: Hot Wing King, ANNA, Damned by Despair (National Theatre); A Streetcar Named Desire (Almeida / West End / BAM Theatre, NYC); Machinal (Almeida) ; Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare’s Globe); Moonlight / Night School (Harold Pinter); One Night in Miami, Coriolanus (Donmar Warehouse); Henry V (Regent’s Park); The Iphigenia Quartet (Gate Theatre); Hamlet (Barbican); The Twits (Royal Court); Titus Andronicus, A Mad World, My Masters & Candide (RSC); Romeo and Juliet (Stafford Shakespeare Festival); Torque (Bush Theatre); The Fiddler & Life on the Stairs (Faith Drama Productions). Television credits include: Saviour (ITV), Believe Me (ITV), A Town Called Malice (Sky Max), Enterprise (BBC), Into the Badlands (AMC), Our Girl (BBC), Doctors (BBC), and Tut (Spike). Film credits include: The Thing with Feathers and Mindhorn (Scott Free / BBC Film).

Recognised for bold reinterpretations of classic texts, Anthony Almeida, multi-award-winning theatre and opera director, turns to Shakespeare with his first staging of Othello. His productions have received international acclaim, with Heroïne for Opéra national de Lorraine named among Le Monde‘s productions of the year and praised by leading European critics, including Opernwelt. Almeida is the only director to have received both the RTST Sir Peter Hall Director Award and the European Opera Director Prize and has been nominated for the International Opera Awards’ Rising Star Award and The Stage Debut Awards’ Best Director. He has been Resident Director at both the Almeida Theatre and the Royal Opera House. This production marks Almeida’s first Shakespeare, bringing his internationally recognised approach to reinvention to one of theatre’s defining texts.

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; Production Manager Suzie Normand; Costume Supervisor Sara Mackenzie and Casting Director Karishma Balani.

Othello plays at Northern Stage 11 – 26 September. Tickets are available here.