Bold. direct. emotional
Othello
A Play in Black and White is Roysten Abel’s razor-edged reimagining of Shakespeare – where the stage is not a safe distance from life, but a doorway into it.
The Experience
A winner of the prestigious Scotsman Fringe First Award at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, this is Shakespeare crossed with contemporary India. It is staged with a heightened theatricality that makes the personal political, and the political intensely personal.
A classical Kathakali-trained performer is cast as Othello – an artistic choice that electrifies the room. The company’s polished, affluent world is disrupted by an outsider whose presence forces uncomfortable questions: Who belongs? Who leads? Whose English, whose culture, whose stage?
As rehearsals deepen, reality begins to slip. Lines are spoken, then lived. Motives are rehearsed, then acted out. What begins as performance becomes confrontation, until it is no longer clear where Shakespeare ends and the actors begin.
The Performance
Provocative
A theatre experience that challenges power, identity, and belonging, forcing uncomfortable truths into the open.
Layered
Unflinching
A Play Within a Play
A Living Theatrical Reckoning
An English theatre company invites a guest director to stage Othello using elements of Kathakali. Instead of casting the lead from within the company, the director gives Othello to Adil, a Kathakali trainer from rural India.
Barry, the company’s senior actor, loses the lead role and is cast as Iago. As tensions rise, Adil falls in love with Kristen (Desdemona), while Barry begins to manipulate events offstage with growing malice, echoing Shakespeare’s plot with uncanny precision.
Rehearsals become reality. Reality becomes rehearsal. The tragedy gathers force not only in the script, but in the room itself, until the central question lands like a blade: is it Othello killing Desdemona, or an actor destroying an actress?
Othello’s stellar cast includes, Barry John, Adil Hussain, Dilip Shankar, Lushin Dubey, Daniella Betsy, Kristen Jain and Roysten Abel.