'Iago could be right' – Anthony Almeida on finding the grey areas in Othello at the Citz
Director Anthony Almeida doesn’t believe in black and white he tells Mark Fisher, as he brings his take on the Shakespeare classic to Glasgow
Anthony Almeida has a bone to pick with the Bee Gees. Nothing against the Gibb brothers’ music, you understand. No, what he takes issue with is their definition of tragedy.
In the band’s 1979 cart-topper of that name, they claimed tragedy was when the feeling has gone and you can’t go on. But that’s wrong, says the director.
“No, boys,” he says. “Surely tragedy is when there is too much feeling and you must go on.”
The subject is on Almeida’s mind because of his current production: a staging of Shakespeare’s Othello, which is on its way to Glasgow’s Citizens Theatre, one of the three co-producers, with Northern Stage in Newcastle and Home in Manchester. “Othello is a play about resilience,” he says. “It’s about a willingness to love – Othello says he ‘loved not wisely but too well’ – and it’s about having too much feeling in you, like the corrosive feeling Iago sits with.”
Relocated from its original setting in Venice and Cyprus to Britain in the era of the Falklands War, the play tells the story of the fall of Othello, a high-achieving Moorish general. One of his subordinates, Iago, is angry to have missed out on promotion. To get his back on his boss, he pretends to be loyal, while planting a seed of doubt in Othello’s mind about the fidelity of Othello’s new wife, Desdemona. Their relationship is fatally soured.
What drew Almeida to the play were its unresolved questions. “Why does the play haunt me?” he says. “Why does Othello disturb me?”
Staging it was the way to seek answers. His wanted to avoid the certainties of a play so often presented, figuratively as well as literally, as black and white. The drama is more interesting, he reasons, if the characters are ambiguous and hard to pin down.
What if Iago has redeeming features and is not entirely consumed by malice? What if Othello is not only the victim of a cynical plot, but also a man with weak points?
“I’m deliberately trying to make this show for all points of view,” says Almeida, fascinated to see the reactions in cities with different demographics as the show tours. “It’s not a correctional production. It’s a production that’s trying to invite all sorts of politics and points of view.”
He adds: “I don’t believe in the heroes and villains, like the black and white of Star Wars. I think it’s all a bit grey. Iago could be right. Othello does questionable stuff, irrational stuff. He makes a set of choices that are his to make. If you are on team Othello, you go in one direction, and if you are on team Iago, you will go in another that is completely valid.”
In particular, the director is interested in what the play reveals about the way we perceive each other. What judgements do we make about people based on their appearance, their accent and their class? In return, what compromises do we make to fit in? Are we prepared to suppress our distinctive characteristics – including sexuality, gender and mental well-being – in order to be accepted?
The play’s military setting foregrounds such questions. “It’s the very strict cultural world of masculinity where discipline, competence, control and emotional restraint are all there, but underneath, there’s fear, shame, sexual anxiety and an enormous need to belong. You have shiny shoes but you’re wiping your nose on your sleeve – presentation but crumbling underneath.”
The army prizes uniformity over individuality and, in theory, does not discriminate against anyone who toes the line. But is Othello’s military achievement enough to make him accepted as a black man in a white society? “It feels like they’re saying, ‘You’re a black man, but we only like bits of you,’” says Almeida. “We’ll take you because you’re good at what you do. We’ll tolerate parts of you. Othello accepts that identity – ‘Haply for I am black’ – but says he is many other things as well. Why are they trying to reduce him to just one thing?”
This extends to questions about identity in all its forms. “Of all Shakespeare’s plays, this is the one that is most anxious about identity politics. There is a dissonance between the version of yourself that you believe you are and the version that a taxi driver sees you as. If that is a daily struggle, how do you navigate that? We’ve been talking a lot in rehearsals about assimilation and code-switching. If we’ve all been born with a set of identity cards, it’s interesting what ID cards people play towards you depending on what room you go into.”
Almeida gives the example of when he worked behind the bar in a pub: chatting to the customers, he kept quiet about his theatre and opera directing, and played up his credentials as a local Bristol boy. He gets his actors to make similar choices for their characters. If Othello wants to present himself as a general, what dramatic tension arises if another character sees him primarily as a black man?
“It makes it feel personal,” says Almeida. “The actors can bring their full selves to it.”
Those actors include Phoebe Smyth, making her professional theatre debut as Desdemona, and Maanuv Thiara, playing Iago. Leading a pared-down cast of eight, Dwane Walcott has qualities the director saw as essential for the part of Othello: “His grace, his humanity… in presentation, he is so young and athletic, but yet such an old soul. He is someone who doesn’t have to perform their experience: it is felt and connected.”
If, then, he was attracted to Othello because it troubled him, how does he feel after spending so many weeks with it? “I think I’m more troubled than I was to start with,” he says, looking serious. “I have more questions than answers. That, for me, is time well spent in rehearsal. That’s what I enjoy in art. That play has taught me more than I knew about empathy. For that I’m grateful.”
Othello, Citizens’ Theatre, Glasgow, 27 October–7 November. This feature was produced in association with the Citizens’ Theatre.
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