The revivial of Frantic Assembly's Othello began a nationwide tour this week at the Oxford Playhouse. Daily Info sat down with Joe Layton, who is playing Iago, and Scott Graham, the company's Artistic Director, to chat this new production, how the production marries Frantic Assembly's physical theatre with Shakespeare's text, and the company's journey to date.
Daily Info: For those who aren't familiar with it, what's Othello about?
Joe Layton: Love, jealousy and lies - universal and timeless themes we find in so many of Shakespeare’s plays - Othello is a tragic tale of revenge, betrayal and loss. Iago is a wounded man with nothing to lose when we meet him at the beginning of the play, he swiftly hatches a plan that wreaks havoc on all those around him he once loved leading to a bloody and violent end for all involved.
DI: And what is the production's vision for the play?
JL: This might not be Shakespeare as you expect it - our Othello is set in modern day and Venice becomes the back room of a run down pub. The actors speak in their own accents and the text is delivered naturally. It’s daring. It’s accessible. And audiences understand it. People often ask after the show how the modern text was put in alongside Shakespeare’s original text - spoiler alert - the text is unchanged - this is testament to Scott Graham’s fantastic and searing adaptation, boiling what is often a 3.5 hour marathon in a scintillating and visually stunning 2 hours.
DI: How does Frantic Assembly's approach to physical theatre mesh with the Bard's text?
Scott Graham: There is a huge muscularity to the text but there is also an immense human vulnerability behind those words. That is exactly the same tension I instinctively explore physically. We are all experts in body language in our ordinary lives and can read a room without the need for words and can sense any subtext to a context. The richness of the text does not mean that it only exists in the head. In the rehearsal room we explored where the story can be told through text or physically, knowing that audiences are brilliant at reading these complexities. Text and physicality inform each other.
The physical approach can be seen in the choreography that replaces a lot of the expositional text but it can also be seen in how the performers exist on stage. We spent quite a bit of time just getting the performers to stand on stage truthfully. It was not enough to just sound like you were making sense. We wanted the words to really sit within the body. The physical approach does not intend to dance all over the words but to help them connect with clarity.
Othello is partly about the potential of our feelings to destroy us. It is about our potential to be hurt and what that does to our reasoning. It is about love, sex and the burning pain of jealousy. It is so physical.
DI: Othello is a revival of a production first performed in 2008. Why bring this production back?
SG: Whenever you return to a project, you hopefully return wiser. You have changed. So has the society within which you have presented it. Othello highlighted the social tension I saw in 2008 and now it shows the power and poison of misinformation in 2022. It feels incredibly timely! It shows a community that tears itself apart through manipulation without ever really testing the veracity of the information destroying it. We are all vulnerable to this because misinformation makes us feel hurt and abused and that feeling makes it seem real. As Othello says, ‘then you must speak of one that loved not wisely but too well.’ It was his potential for love that made him susceptible and ultimately, a fool.
It might be the genius of Shakespeare’s work that always allows us to see a contemporary relevance in it but I felt the time was right to return to the production and see if I, certainly being older, could be wiser and make this story feel even more fresh and vital.
DI: How does it feel to look back on the extraordinary journey Frantic Assembly has been on in the past 28 years? Are there any standout productions for the company?
SG: It is frequently surreal but always beautiful when people stop me to tell me what Frantic Assembly means to them or what their first experience of our work was. A lot has changed over time but what gives me immense pride is that the ethos has not. It was built on an openness and desire to inspire creativity and every day across the UK and beyond we are leading workshops with young people and doing just that.
Different productions stand out for different reasons. Lovesong and Things I Know to be True connected with audiences in way that made them leave wanting to immediately call their loved ones. The Believers was a big one for me as it was my first solo show. I could have played it safe but wanted to challenge every expectation there might be about how Frantic Assembly makes work. I feel very proud of that show. I think it is those moments of bravery that makes productions stand out for me and Othello is probably the production where we took the biggest risk. It was one that certainly paid off, not just changing what people thought we were capable of but what we thought we were capable of.
DI: Can you sum up Frantic Assembly's Othello in three words?
JL: Brutal, shocking, thrilling.
Frantic Assembly's Othello runs at the Oxford Playhouse until Saturday 12th November. Check out our review too.