Shakespeare’s Othello - Lara Foot

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A South African adaptation of Shakespeare’s classic tragedy, performed in English, isiXhosa, and Afrikaans

Shakespeare’s Othello 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. Lara Foot’s provocative decolonial adaptation explores Othello’s inner life through an African perspective from the time of German colonialism, to the time of the Herero uprising in German Southwest Africa, to present-day Namibia. 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.

“A masterful adaptation...This is an immersive theatrical experience which feeds various appetites as it unfurls, the eyes, the mind, the heart, the emotions, and, lastly, understanding.” – Marianne Thamm, Daily Maverick

Professor Shose Kessi, Dean of Humanities at the University of Cape Town, explains, “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 to not only 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 for decolonial love."

“The South African theater maker Lara Foot manages to take a new perspective on Shakespeare's play: she places it in the heyday of European colonialism...” - Nachricht

“The audience at the opening premiere gave a resounding applause for an evening that is fed by Shakespeare's timeless knowledge of human nature as well as by a clever feeling for the present.” - Rheinische Post