Booking is now open for Lara Foot’s highly anticipated adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Othello, which makes its South African premiere at the Baxter Theatre in Rondebosch from Saturday 6 April to Saturday 4 May.
The hugely acclaimed production, also directed by Foot, made its debut at the Düsseldorf Schauspielhaus last September and earned her a Gustaf Theatre Award 2023 for Outstanding Artistic Achievement for direction.
Foot once again teams up with 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 also 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 (Brabantio), Lyle October (Montano), Tamzin Williams (Bianca), Awethu Hleli (various roles), Brendon Sean Murray (Duke and various roles), Nolufefe Ntshuntshe (various roles) and Caleb Swanepoel (various).
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 relocating it to the time of German colonialism, to the time of the Herero uprising in German South-West Africa, and to present-day Namibia.
Professor Shose Kessi, Dean of Humanities at the University of Cape Town, explained: “The adaptation of Shakespeare’s Othello by Lara Foot is an ambitious and provocative decolonial interpretation of the original piece. Set in Namibia (then German South-West Africa), it invites audiences to grapple with the legacies of the brutal violence of colonisation, hinting at the Herero and Nama genocide in the early 20th century.
“There are many aspects of Foot’s production that propose a decolonial reading of Shakespeare’s Othello. Perhaps one of the most sophisticated so far, the piece fits into an emerging body of work that seeks not only to disrupt the centrality of Shakespeare and western literature in contemporary spaces, but also to resist Eurocentric readings of the colonial past. It highlights the role of theatre as both a political instrument to challenge colonial violence and a possible site of decolonial love.”
It 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 historical traces of such deeply ingrained hatred and finds them in the colonial wars of the 19th and 20th centuries.
Othello is supported by the provincial Department of Cultural Affairs and Sport, City of Cape Town, Department of Sport, Arts and Culture, National Arts Council, the Presidential Stimulus Employment Programme, Oppenheimer Memorial Trust and NATi.
It runs at The Pam Golding Theatre at the Baxter, with performances scheduled for 19:30 on weekdays, with Saturday matinées at 14:00 and weekday school performances at 11:00. Booking is through Webtickets or at Pick n Pay stores.
