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by William Shakespeare, directed by Haysam Kadri

Stratford Festival, Tom Patterson Theatre, Stratford

June 19–September 27, 2026

Emilia: “But jealous souls will not be answered so.

They are not ever jealous for the cause,

But jealous for they’re jealous”

The current production of Othello is the Stratford Festival’s fourth since 2000. Of these the production now playing at the Tom Patterson Theatre has the best balanced pairing of protagonist and antagonist — Othello and Iago. Theoretically, this ought to make for an exciting evening. It is a great pity, therefore, that director Haysom Kadri confounds our interest by loading the production with so many concepts that are in conflict with the text and even with themselves.

The first problem is Kadri’s notion of who or what Iago is. We can see from the very start that things are going awry when Kadri has Iago make an entrance before Shakespeare’s text begins clad in a long, black cloak, a hood hiding his face. The ominous music, the glowing red of the stage perimeter and the tips of the gothic arches suspended over it with billowing smoke everywhere all suggest that the creature in the cloak is a being from hell. When Iago makes his first entrance as per Shakespeare’s text, he and Roderigo enter from a trap door in the stage as if from the underworld.

Is Kadri really suggesting that Iago is actually a devil? If so, that ruins the entire play because it makes Othello’s demise a foregone conclusion. If Kadri is suggesting that Iago is like a devil, that notion is far too simplistic. The notion harks back to Coleridge’s concept of Iago as an example of “motiveless malignity” from his lecture on Othello in 1818. It’s an idea that has plagued productions of Othello up to the present day. How is a villain without motive interesting?

A close reading of the text shows that Iago seeks revenge on Othello for passing over him to promote Cassio to be his second in command. Iago will accompany Othello as his ensign, but says, “In following him, I follow but myself; / Heaven is my judge, not I for love and duty, / But seeming so, for my peculiar end”. By the end of Act 1, we learn that Iago’s “peculiar end” is primarily against Cassio, “To get his place and to plume up my will”, i.e., to accuse Cassio of being too familiar with Desdemona so that Othello will be embarrassed and replace Cassio with Iago. By the end of Act 2, Scene 1, Iago says his plan now is to bed Desdemona since he has heard a rumour that Othello has bedded Emilia. But, as he says, “Or failing so, yet that I put the Moor / At least into a jealousy so strong / That judgment cannot cure”.

It should be obvious only this far into the play that Iago has no grand plan. There is no talk of encouraging Othello to kill Desdemona or of killing Roderigo and Cassio. The phrase “Or failing so” shows that Iago is making his plans impromptu. His plans become more desperate when Othello and later Roderigo sense that Iago has been lying to them. This is the mode of thought of a severely flawed human being, not some supernatural being. The best production of Othello I have ever seen, the RSC production directed by Michael Attenborough in 2000, made it clear that the character most driven by jealousy is Iago. He is jealous of Cassio being awarded a job he thinks should be his and of Othello’s power and ability to be loved by someone like Desdemona.

Kadri, though, still attempts to make Iago an embodiment of evil by having him act as the Vice figure in medieval drama. The Vice figure speaks directly to the audience, links them to him through humour, tells them his plan, carries it out and gloats over it afterwards. Shakespeare’s most famous use of this device is the title character in Richard III. The difficulty in trying to make Iago into a Vice figure is that Iago, unlike Richard, is following no consistent plan and is definitely not funny.

Nevertheless, any time Iago has an aside, Kadri has a loud clunk and drastic lighting change precede it and follow it to set it off from the dialogue. Although Kadri has Iago direct his words to the audience, what we note is Iago’s complete humourlessness and the makeshift nature of his ever-changing plans. Iago’s asides are best viewed as the character’s tortured inner thoughts.

Kadri casting decisions complicate the play further. Colour-blind casting is the rule nowadays for all of Shakespeare’s plays except for Othello and Titus Andronicus where it is thought that the race of the actor playing Othello or Aaron must match the race of the character. Thus, following a tradition at Stratford that first began in 1987, Othello is played by Black actor and Iago by a White actor. Kadri has decided that Cassio is also Black. This makes it look like Iago’s anger is simply anti-Black racism. Or it would do except that Kadri has decided that Iago’s wife is also Black.

As if this were not confusing enough, Kadri also brings characters on stage whom other characters are only thinking about. When Othello makes his famous speech to the Senate in Act 1, Kadri has Desdemona appear to speak the lines that refer to her. It’s a bad idea to create such a distraction in Othello’s longest, most eloquent speech. Kadri decides to give Othello auras to his main epileptic fit in Act 4. These occur whenever Cassio is mentioned, so Kadri has Cassio appear in a spotlight with surrounding smoke looking like a ghost. When this first happened, I had to remind myself that Cassio was not only not dead yet, but, in fact, does not die at all during the play.

Laden as they are with this jumble of directorial ideas, the principal actors still manage to give fine performances. Ever since André Sills joined the Stratford company, I have been looking forward to his Othello. His performance could not be bettered. Sills shows how the seed of jealousy that Iago sows subtly take hold until Othello’s better nature revolts against Iago’s insinuations and demands “ocular proof”. When Iago supplies it, from that point on, Othello’s jealousy regards Desdemona as an enemy, even though up until the murders Sills shows how Othello’s memories of love struggle to combat the “green-eyed monster” that has taken him over.

Kadri has saddled Evan Buliung with an almost impossible task in playing Iago. Kadri wants Buliung to play Iago as if the character had a fixed plan to destroy Othello and Cassio from the beginning which, as I’ve shown, goes contrary to the text. Nevertheless, Buliung is such a fine, and forceful actor that he is able to deliver Iago’s doubt-filled asides as if they were deliberate decisions, even though the very words Iago says contradict the certainty that Buliung gives them. This contradiction produces the effect that Iago is completely out of touch with reality in thinking he is controlling events instead of merely responding to them. An approach like that of Richard McCabe in Attenborough’s Othello of 2000, is infinitely more exciting since McCabe’s Iago realized that he was always on the verge of being found out. Nonetheless, Buliung’s Iago is still effective as a man whom jealousy has deluded more deeply than Othello.

Krystin Pellerin makes a delicate Desdemona, not quite fitting the description of her as the “captain’s captain”, but yet strong enough to defend herself against Othello’s outrageous accusations against her. Jessica B. Hill makes a very strong impression as Emilia. Given this strength, it would have been fitting if Kadri ad allowed Emilia to begin suspect Iago of evil-doing in her exchange with him in Act 4, Scene 2 when says, “The Moor's abused by some most villainous knave, / Some base notorious knave”. I have seen this done in previous productions and it heightens the tension and leads naturally to Emilai’s outburst again Iago in Act 5. To Kadri’s credit, however, he allows Emilia her long speech again male privilege (“But I do think it is their husbands' faults / If wives do fall”) which is one of the most pro-feminist statements in Shakespeare.

Not up to the task, Jordin Hall as Cassio has not yet learned how to speak Shakespearean verse, often pausing in the midst of lines and disrupting their flow. Hall shares the stage with two of the best speakers of Shakespeare at the Festival – André Sills and Evan Buliung – who are able to make Shakespeare verse sound completely natural while still conveying its poetry. One would think that acting in their presence would instruct him, but it seems not to.

On the other hand, Rylan Wilkie plays Roderigo not as the usual fool but as an ill-tempered rogue deluded by Iago’s promises of helping him obtain access to Desdemona. If Kadri has altered the conventional race of Cassio and Emilia, he has also altered the gender of Brabantio and Ludovico. As Brabantia, Chick Reid does not give the comically blustering figure the outraged father can be. Irene Poole, however, as Ludovica is especially strong and her condemnation of Iago just as terrifying as it should be.

While Gillian Gallow has clad the cast in rather generic Renaissance garb, Brian Dudkiewicz has provided an enigmatic set. At the back wall of the Patterson, he has reproduced the back wall of the Festival Theatre with its symmetrical staircases and balcony. This balcony, however, can (pointlessly) separate from the wall and move forward. Overhead hang decrepit-looking Gothic arches that can (pointlessly) rise and fall. In making all these arches reflect the three-point Gothic style of Northern Europe, Dudkiewicz misses out an important irony about the Venetian Republic. Though ruthlessly Christian, the architecture of the Republic was heavily influenced by Moorish and Islamic architecture, i.e. the architecture of its enemies. Hence ogees and multifoil arches would be more appropriate to the period of the action and more symbolic.

The only furniture, except for the bed in Act 5, consists of pieces of arches that the cast arranges into different configurations, including a scissor arch, an English style. What do the decrepit arches mean? One possibility is that they suggest that faith is broken, though in the given time period Venetian government was staunchly Catholic and became repressively anti-Lutheran from 1520 onwards. Why the tips of the hanging arches glow red in the Iago-as-devil scenes is a mystery. Is Dudkiewicz implying that the church is also evil?

Despite these anomalies and directorial misinterpretations, this Othello is a superb showcase for the acting of André Sills and Evan Buliung. They are among Canada’s greatest living Shakespearean actors. One can only wish that they were performing in a production that did not distract from their efforts.

Christopher Hoile

Photos: Evan Buliung as Iago, André Sills as Othello and Krystin Pellerin as Desdemona; Evan Buliung as Iago; Evan Buliung as Iago, André Sills as Othello, Jessica B. Hill as Emilia and Krystin Pellerin as Desdemona; Jessica B. Hill as Emilia and Krystin Pellerin as Desdemona; André Sills as Othello and Krystin Pellerin as Desdemona. © 2026 David Hou.

For tickets visit: www.stratfordfestival.ca.