We’re in the Cypress pub as opposed to in Cyprus for this Othello Adapted for Frantic Assembly by Scott Graham and Steven Hoggett. It’s a thuggish world of gang warfare, ruthless competing for girls and a great deal of violence with rounders bats and knives around a versatile snooker table. There’s a lot of powerful physical theatre (fights directed by director director Simon Pittman and Kev McCurdy) which effectively becomes dance drama to drive the narrative. Back stories are revealed and, at the beginning, we see Othello (Mohammed Mansaray) and Desdemona (Rebecca Hesketh-Smith) meet for the first time. Soon we slide into Shakespeare’s language which sometimes sounds faintly quaint given the setting but also reminds us of the timelessness of the themes.
Mansaray’s Othello, voiced in a South London accent seasoned with a hint of Jamaican sounds curiously childish and hesitant when he’s being gentle but he has a fair amount of authority. Later when he’s angry and bent on revenge his voice deepens and, whites of his eyes spinning, he becomes both frightening and pitiful. It’s a well judged performance by a promising young actor. Hesketh-Smith delights as a very natural as Desdemona, an ordinary girl whose “misfortune” is to fall in love with a charismatic man of a different racial background. Hesketh-Smith gets the horror beautifully as she realises he really is going to kill her and full marks to whoever thought of positioning their bodies in exactly the same way for the strangling as for the earlier lovemaking.
Lighting designer Amy Mae never lets us forget the play’s darkness. At the end of the first half Jamie Rose’s half crazed Iago is crouched on the snooker table, his evil, plotting face lit white in a surrounding pool of near black. Rose is good at stealthy thuggery and cunning. It’s strong work. Megan Burke is good as Emilia too, especially when she rumbles Iago, stops being just a friend and commits herself totally to getting justice for Desdemona. Then she becomes a real tour de force.
Othello and Jeckyll and Hyde together form a terrific show case for the sixteen young actors, who form the NYT’s 2017 Rep Company. We shall, I am certain, here more of many of them very soon.
Review by Susan Elkin