In 1964, the National Theatre Company staged Othello with Laurence Olivier playing the military commander in blackface. Clint Dyer’s new production speaks to the play’s murky performance history in its opening optics, perhaps even to the ghost of Olivier’s Othello himself. There are posters of old productions projected on to Chloe Lamford’s spare, contemporary set and a cleaner scrubs the floor. It sets up a conceptual overhaul – a coming clean, of sorts.
But we are wrongfooted in the sense that, for much of its three hours, this Othello plays out as a traditional thriller that occasionally veers into melodrama. A new vision does come though, breathtakingly so, in a radical half-hour at the end when it feels as if Dyer is revealing another play beneath the story we know about jealousy and mistrust in which Othello is a flawed hero who commands our sympathies. This other play is about the tragedy of domestic violence. The women are not reduced to victims here while the men, including Othello, are controlling, toxic abusers. It is an almost obvious interpretation, once we have seen and heard it, yet it makes the play feel utterly new.
