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- Herausgeber: Nick Hern Books
- Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
- Sprache: Englisch
Frantic Assembly's electrifying take on Shakespeare's tragedy of paranoia, sex and murder, firmly rooted in a volatile twenty-first century. In a world of broken glass and shattered promises, of poisonous manipulation and explosive violence, Othello's passionate affair with Desdemona becomes the catalyst for jealousy, betrayal, revenge and the darkest intents. As relevant today as it ever was, Othello exposes the tension, fear and paranoia buried beneath the veneer of our relationships and how easily that can be maliciously exploited. Frantic Assembly's touring production was first performed in 2008, with revivals in 2014 and 2022. This edition of Scott Graham and Steven Hoggett's muscular, radically adapted text also features articles and interviews about the production and Frantic Assembly's revolutionary work. 'Frantic Assembly breathe new life into Shakespeare's tale... in Scott Graham's pulse-racing production' - Time Out 'A fierce reimagining of Shakespeare's tragedy' - The Times 'Pulsating... hurls Othello well and truly into our times' - Independent
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
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William Shakespeare
OTHELLO
adapted for the stage by
Scott Graham and Steven Hoggett
NICK HERN BOOKS
London
www.nickhernbooks.co.uk
Contents
Director’s Foreword
About the Director
Frantic Assembly’s Othello by Lyn Gardner
Original Production Details
Rehearsal Photographs
About the Producers
Othello
Copyright and Performing Rights Information
Director’s ForewordScott Graham
I have written before about how there was never an intention to present Othello. When Frantic Assembly was a scrappy young company we were more about finding our own voice within theatre, presenting work that felt immediate and fresh. To take on Othello was to be presented with a baggage that none of our previous projects came with. Until this point, I had always thought that creating new work with new writing would lead to, at worst, people telling us that they did or did not like it. It would not lead to anyone telling us that we had totally got it wrong. That was the risk around Othello.
In embracing Othello, we were adamant that we also had to be true to all of the work we had done in finding our place within theatre. Our previous work always felt like it was somehow us. It had to be explored and presented in a way that felt truthful. It was crucial that Othello never felt like merely dressing up and in the process losing what we had fought for.
We began with the book Dark Heart, The Shocking Truth About Hidden Britain by Nick Davies. It was suggested by Mark Ravenhill and was the basis of a potential project we were exploring together. The book touched us with its tales of dissolution and disenfranchisement, disturbingly chronicling racial and social tension in the UK’s underbelly. Suddenly Othello came alive. The brutal urban world of Dark Heart collided with the dynamic personal, social and racial tensions of Othello. It became immediate and vital. It connected with us and the fear of merely acting out a play was gone.
I return to Othello today in a world that has changed. We are seeing the world through a different lens. We are in a post-truth world of misinformation and its corrosive impact. We are its victims. But what is new? Shakespeare was way ahead of us. Othello is all about the impact of the poison of misinformation. We do not need verification to feel we are sinned against and once the idea is placed within us it ‘gnaws our inwards’ making us feel it must be true. Nothing has changed. We are just as vulnerable as ever.
Othello remains a fundamentally important production for Frantic Assembly. It is a symbol of artistic ambition, of the necessity of our work to connect and feel truthful. It is also an example of our wider work in making engagement and employment within theatre accessible. Five of our Othello team came to the industry through Ignition, our program that looks for talent where others might not have considered looking. This is fundamentally important and the fruits of this labour is evident within the production and within all of the young people we train and employ across the country. Ignition has had a profound effect upon the lives of so many young people across the UK and is making its mark within the arts ecology. It must find a way to thrive and keep unearthing talent.
This Othello is made with a deep respect for the text. Every moment I spend with it increases that love. Shakespeare’s Othello is brilliant and robust. It can handle this twenty-first-century exploration and will keep on shining a light on our lives in another four hundred years. To capture the fire I believe is in its heart, our Othello must be searing in its intensity. It must be blistering in its physicality. After twenty-eight years of making work, Frantic Assembly must never stand still. This is not the easy way out, remounting a show I already know works. It is the opportunity to present this brilliant play in a unique way that must seem vital today and not just something that worked for Frantic in 2008 or 2014 (or for anyone else in 1603 for that matter). This is about the opportunity to present a play that speaks to us today, maybe to say that we were always this complex. Maybe to say we always will be.
2022
Scott Graham
Scott is Artistic Director of Frantic Assembly, co-founding the company in 1994. He has received nominations for his work on Beautiful Burnout (Drama Desk Award, New York), The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (Olivier, Tony and Fred Astaire Awards). With Steven Hoggett he won the TMA Award (now UK Theatre Awards) for Best Direction for Othello. He has provided movement direction for shows at the Royal National Theatre, National Theatre Wales and National Theatre of Scotland. His recent directing credits with Frantic Assembly include TOUCH, I Think We Are Alone, Sometimes Thinking, Fatherland, Things I Know To Be True.
He has developed and written extensively about The Frantic Method. With Steven Hoggett, he has written The Frantic Assembly Book of Devising Theatre (Routledge). Scott is passionate about creating opportunities for people who might see theatre as a challenge or alienating, and believes that these new voices and fresh perspectives are vital to the health of the arts.
Frantic Assembly’s OthelloLyn Gardner
Why did you change Shakespeare’s language? That’s the question that someone in the audience asked leading British theatre company Frantic Assembly after seeing its production of Shakespeare’s Othello which relocates the play from sixteenth-century Venice to a pub on a run-down Yorkshire housing estate in a post-industrial town. To which Frantic’s reply was, ‘We didn’t.’ Artistic Director Scott Graham is proud that ‘every word you hear in our Othello was written by William Shakespeare over four centuries ago.’
For Graham, working on a text written by Shakespeare is no different to collaborating with the many contemporary writers with whom the company works, including The Split creator Abi Morgan who penned the hit shows Tiny Dynamite and Lovesong for Frantic, or Succession writer Anna Jordan who wrote The Unreturning for the company.
‘Shakespeare’s really very good,’ says Graham wryly, ‘it’s four hundred years of genius. We feel very lucky to be collaborating with one of the best writers in the world. We never wanted to rewrite Shakespeare, we never wanted to compromise the language, but we did want to do a version of Othello where the clarity of the world, of the storytelling and of the tensions and meanings in the play are made very clear. If you do that and do it well, then you can sneak the language in under the radar.’
Frantic do it very well in a production in which Othello, the black man who in Shakespeare’s original has risen to become an admired general in the army, becomes the leader of a local gang. But the cracks in his position begin to show when he marries the daughter of a local white man. In 110 violently watchable minutes, set around a pool table in a pub, the jealousy of gang member, Iago – who feels overlooked and underappreciated – turns malignant, and he persuades Othello that his young bride, Desdemona, has been unfaithful. With tragic consequences.
We are often told that Shakespeare is our contemporary and his plays speak to modern theatre audiences, but Graham is acutely aware that many of us are put off Shakespeare for life by our experience of the plays at school. He sees it as his job to make Othello – a play about power, male rage, jealousy and murder – seem fresh-minted. Forget the idea of a play written in a language that seems fusty and difficult to understand, and think instead of a pulsating, tightly choreographed racy thriller in which Othello and Desdemona consummate their love on the pool table; the men swagger around the space with an animal grace as they jockey for position and test out tribal rivalries and loyalties; we see Desdemona and her friend Emilia gossiping in the ladies’ toilets; and the walls of the pub itself seem to move and pulsate as the emotional temperature in the room changes.
Othello has been one of the company’s greatest successes and brought Frantic new admirers from teenagers to teachers, Shakespeare-phobics to Shakespeare scholars. But when the idea of staging a Shakespeare play was first suggested more than fifteen years ago, the company – whose pioneering approach to British theatre in which movement and text are married in innovative and thrilling ways – didn’t think Shakespeare was for them. Graham hadn’t even read the play.
But when he did, he recognised that the themes of friendship, sex, betrayal, jealousy and violence were remarkably similar to those which the company had already been mining in a series of productions inspired by their own lives and interests. The company’s ability to hurl themselves across stages to create maximum emotional impact and textual clarity had already won Frantic the kind of following that’s more associated with rock bands than theatre companies. The question was whether they could do that with Shakespeare?
The stakes were high. Shakespeare is a cultural icon. People have fixed ideas about how the plays should be produced, what you can and can’t do with them. Graham knew it would require brilliant storytelling, a cast who understand every word they speak and harnessing a physical and emotional language so that every word in the original text conveys meaning to the audience. ‘But it was a risk,’ he recalls, ‘for the first time there was a baggage around the play we were staging. Sometimes people hadn’t liked the shows we had made, and that’s always fine, but this was the first time that it felt as if somebody might see the show and say, “You are wrong, you can’t do that with Shakespeare.”’
Instead, what happened was that audiences, both young and old, were relieved to experience a production which didn’t feel like some kind of cultural medicine which if they saw would do them good, but a Shakespeare show that was genuinely thrilling.
