Booking is now open for Lara Foot’s highly anticipated Othello, by William Shakespeare, which makes its South African premiere at The Pam Golding Theatre at the Baxter from 6 April to 4 May 2024, featuring a sterling creative team and cast.
The hugely acclaimed production, adapted and directed by Foot, made its debut at the Düsseldorf Schauspielhaus in September 2023, to celebrated praise and earned her the Gustaf Theatre Award 2023 for Outstanding Artistic Achievement for the Direction of Othello.
Foot once again teams up with an award-winning formidable creative team: designer Gerhard Marx, a fellow of the Eckhart Residency, the Sundance Film Institute, the Annenberg Fund and the Ampersand Foundation; Kyle Shepherd (music composition) and Patrick Curtis (lighting). She has assembled a stellar cast, led by Atandwa Kani in the title role of Othello, Albert Pretorius (Iago), Carla Smith (Desdemona), Fansiwa Yisa (Emilia), Carlo Daniels (Cassio), Wessel Pretorius (Roderigo), Morne Visser (Father), Lyle October (Montano), Tamzin Williams (Bianca), Awethu Hleli (various roles), Brendon Murray (Duke and various roles), Nolufefe Ntshuntshe (various roles) and Caleb Swanepoel (various).
Colonial wars
In this South African production, performed in English, isiXhosa and Afrikaans, Foot focuses on Othello’s inner life, wanting to add an African perspective, staging the play in several languages and relocates it to the time of German colonialism, to the time of the Herero uprising in German Southwest Africa, to present-day Namibia.
Othello is a play in which Shakespeare remorselessly tells of the greatest tragedy imaginable: the destruction of a great love. It is destroyed by envy, distrust, jealousy, hatred; of people who cannot bear to be confronted with the supposedly different, with the stranger. Foot searches for the historical traces of that deeply ingrained hatred and finds them in her story in the colonial wars of the 19th and 20th centuries.
What: Othello
Where and when: Baxter from 6 April to 4 May 2024
Tickets: Webtickets
WS
