When I think of Othello, I think of the friends I had in high school.
Nights at the club. Blurred photographs of smiling faces. Neon lamplight. Windows rolled down in the car. Shared jackets. Elbows, knees, and ankles invading everyone’s personal space. Hot, sticky summer. Small snatches of tension that everyone ignores. Inside jokes and wild laughter. The drunken, tantalizing pleasure of closeness; the promise that this companionship, this familiarity, lasts forever.
It was essential to me that this production of Othello could not be staged in a large theatre. I wanted to play with the unease that comes from collapsing physical distances between action and audience. I wanted the performance to feel seductively— and uncomfortably—intimate. I wanted the audience’s personal space to feel invaded, for them to feel the voyeurism of observing such private relationships so closely.
Theatre is about boundaries. It is concerned with the limits of fantasy and verisimilitude, of spatial and emotional distances—and the extent to which those boundaries may be pushed.
Experimentations with immersive theatre have grown exponentially in recent performance history. In 2017, Nicholas Hytner turned audiences into protest mobs with his red-carpet Julius Caesar. In 2019, he inspired a hallucinatory carnival (with trapezes and airborne mattresses) in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Across the world, Punchdrunk slipped masks onto our faces and prompted us to wander into the wilderness: prowling the floors of a murky hotel in Sleep No More, or stirring the blood-soaked dirt of Iphigenia’s sacrifice in The Burnt City.
Considering these complex forms of theatre, the ‘immersive’ quality of Othello haunts me especially.
Othello is a play about intimacy. It’s about friends getting caught in each other’s love lives, in each other’s sex lives; it’s about compact spaces, voyeurism, the discomfort of feeling too close to other people’s bodies and seeing too closely into their minds. It’s about vulnerability, exposure, self-loathing. This group of friends are all trapped together in a fatal cycle, complex affections and hatreds overspilling as boundaries blur.
Throughout high school, I identified with Iago.
Iago is pragmatic. Iago is funny. Iago is loyal. Iago devotes his life to his friends: pep-talking them, listening to their secrets, running their errands, serving as their emotional punching bag. He’s the one who looks after everyone when they’re hungover, or sad, or troubled. He’s the rock and the glue of their group. As time passes, he resents them deeply for not noticing his loneliness. Yet part of him luxuriates in being in the position of ‘caretaker’: it allows him to observe his friends when they don’t realize they’re being observed, to know them intimately.
The fictional scenarios Iago creates to convince Othello showcase a desire to place himself in the most intimate positions with his friends. He describes himself in Cassio’s embrace, subjected to Cassio’s kisses — “as if he pluck’d up kisses by the roots that grew upon my lips” — as a substitute body ‘mistaken’ for Desdemona. It is not enough for Iago to merely imagine his friends doing intimate, private things. Above all, he must be the connecting point for their embraces. He must be involved. Iago loves being needed, just as he lives the shadowed insecurity of someday not being needed.
I fell in and out of fascination with all my friends, drawn in by the enigma of a person, enticed by illusions of closeness as I wanted to peel each face apart, layer by layer. Like a voyeur, I hoarded snatches of personal information and attached significance to small moments of mutual confidence. Yet, as boundaries dissolved, I grew disgusted by their childishness, their cowardice, their deceit, their vanity.
It’s one of my primary defects that I cannot help but invest in my friendships as if they were love affairs. I feel that this was something Iago understood.
Against all odds, this embittered, insecure man understood my fragility better than anyone could.
In Othello MT24, we returned over and over again to the bluish, dreamy space of Iago’s mind, the musk of his sadness. We observed how Iago projects his own insecurities, his self-hatred, onto his friend, because he sees Othello as an extension of himself. Iago is inherently self-destructive. He ruins his friends not despite but because he loves them—like Othello, he is compelled to destroy the most precious things in his life by way of destroying himself.
Othello centers itself around a group of people who have defined themselves in direct relation to their friends for so long that they have no idea how to be without them. These relationships are poisonous, codependent, a mixture of protectiveness and irritation, anxiety and affection. It’s about repressing the resentment you feel towards your friends for fear of confronting them, and resenting them further for not noticing what you’ve hidden from them. It’s about the blurring lines between platonic and sexual relationships. It’s about that feeling of being simultaneously enamored with and repulsed by your closest friends —as Iago says, so disgustedly, of Cassio: “He hath a daily beauty in life which makes me ugly.”
I cannot read Othello without feeling as if it is a story deeply personal to myself, my insecurities, my discomfort, because it evokes my friendships, both past and present.
I wanted this story to feel personal. I wanted it to feel invasive, uneasy, grounded in how the act of storytelling violates the privacies of these characters. I wanted the play to dig at the insecurities and the hearts of its viewers, to express the same tenderness with which it once understood me.
Making Othello was a dream. Throughout spring 2024, we pieced together the scattered visuals of this story, scene by scene. I remember, above all, the day we watched Othello and Iago’s confrontation come together. We were four people in a small, intimate rehearsal space. I had one of my dearest friends by my side. When our actors sent their voices up to the ceiling, allowing centuries-old words to cackle on the desiring air, she turned to me with her eyes very wide and I knew, I got it right. I never told her how much I loved watching her react to my creative decisions. That she felt like a thrumming radar that picked up and echoed every emotion I longed to communicate, aching and vulnerable and alive. That she inspired me to make art — that through her every reaction, her flinch, her frown, her smile, I learned how to get it right.
We made magic.
Now summer has come and gone, and everything is different, and I am left holding the memory of that joy like a small lantern in both palms. The friendship I thought forever was momentary. And at my weakest, at my rawest and most tender, I miss her more than I can bear.
We long for intimacy. It is sweeter than wine, smokier than loneliness. It is delectable. It is inebriating. It leaves us reeling, disgusted, drunk on the proximity of another’s beauty even as it leaves us ugly.
When I think of Othello, I think of photographs.
The printed Polaroids scattered across our stage showed the earlier era of the characters’ friendships, before the play officially starts. I wanted to make the audience feel as if they were piecing together the past in snapshots — detective-like, they could observe the conflicting perspectives in a patchwork of rage.
Photographs are an exhibition: the conflict between the emotions you show the world and the ones you hide away; the conflict between surface illusion and inner turmoil.
The term “ocular proof” is integral to the play — Othello repeatedly asks for “ocular proof” of Desdemona’s transgression. I wanted to create a world where Iago can, and does, produce ocular proof by showing us casual photographs of Desdemona and Cassio together.
In Othello MT24, our Iago operated a camera that became a creative object. The camera entertains the idea of Iago as an artist, a man who thinks of his deception as art. It reflects his obsessive need to control how he sees (and how others see) his friends. Furthermore, the supposed authenticity of the camera complements Iago’s ‘honesty’ — Othello is taken in by the ‘honesty’ of these images.
Yet photographs can be deceptive. They present small, limited details that can mislead us should we mistake them for the whole picture. Othello hinges upon misinterpreted conversations and misunderstood circumstances: these photographs embody the dangers of seeing only a small part of the story.
Photographs allow us to go back to the past in time: they are miniature capsules of preserved time. We hold them up as if they might become tunnels to the past. They allow us to cling, like children, to a mantra of longing: we used to be good for each other. We used to be happy.
In Othello, Shakespeare understood the magnetism — and repulsion — that comes with intimacy. He understood the consuming rawness of close friendships. It fills me with wonder, even today, that this man had the words for my insecurities when I did not.
By inviting the audience into the sticky, labyrinthine space we created with Othello MT24, I wished to give those words yet another tang of meaning: my own.
Lying on the deck on hot August afternoons; making snow angels on the grass in May. Long nights savoring each other’s secrets. The brief touch along someone’s elbow, the memory of skin that was once familiar. The lipstick on the rim of a glass. The one kiss we never dared to steal. Above all, this torrent of Polaroids, vomited from the past into the flood, brings the realization that —
At some point, when we weren’t looking, our friendships began to fall apart.
And amidst the flood of memories, we search for the one photograph that might give us the answer: Where did we go wrong? When did we start hating one another?
What have we done to each other? What will we do?
[Michaelmas 2024, an immersive production
of Shakespeare’s Othello was staged
in University College Hall, Oxford.
Presented by student company Arrant Thief Productions,
the show ran from 9-12 November.]