The play begins; two characters enter. One is dark-skinned. He is, of course, Iago… What? Iqbal Khan’s production is set in a contemporary, multicultural world with a multiracial cast. This does not dismiss the issue of race and racism; in that first scene, when Roderigo refers to the absent Othello as “the thicklips”, we see Iago freeze and then buffet Roderigo in obviously only-pretended fun, and later on Cassio’s “very poor unhappy brains for drink” take the form of drunken railing against several black troops onstage. However, it does – for all the programme notes’ protestations to the contrary – remove the principal reason for Othello behaving as he does. He falls prey to jealousy because he is prone to insecurity, on the grounds of being a conspicuous and rare outsider because of his colour. When this is neither conspicuous nor rare, another way must be found.

Hugh Quarshie treads an interesting path in the title role. Othello is normally reeled in only gradually by Iago’s prolonged temptation routine in the middle of the play; instead, Quarshie’s Moor succumbs almost immediately, but to a cold madness rather than a fury. As he threatens, “Villain, be sure thou prove my love a whore,” he performs a range of Abu Ghraib-style tortures on Iago, but he does so with a dissociated assiduity rather than enraged intensity. He is in physical though not psychological control. It is, as I say, interesting, but it can only go so far. In the climactic scene Quarshie’s Othello murders Joanna Vanderham’s exceptionally assured Desdemona, another reading which fascinates for as long as it works and then gives out at the peak, where the traditional angelicism is required instead of panicked feistiness. With such unorthodoxy on each side, the murder and its aftermath seem not really plugged in; the pace is at times sluggish just when it should be up to terminal momentum.

That leaves Lucian Msamati’s Iago: blunt, brisk, the real centre of the play and a fine portrayal until you start demanding insight into the character’s famous “motiveless malignity”. As noble failures of productions go, this is the noblest I have seen for some time, but ultimately still, on balance, a failure.
  
Written for the Financial Times.