William Shakespeare’s Othello

As a company, we have always striven to bring Shakespeare, his characters and his poetry to believable and exciting life and every year we try to stretch ourselves and our audiences by presenting something that is a little bit different to the ‘normal’, traditional renditions of Will’s plays.

With this production however, I have chosen to go full-on traditional and present something that is as close to what might have been seen at the court of James I on November 1^st, 1604, when the King’s Men presented ‘Othello’ for the first time.

1604 was somewhere at the beginning of what has come to be known as Shakespeare’s great tragic period when, between 1600 and 1607, he also wrote    Hamlet (1600), King Lear (1604–5), Macbeth (1606), and Antony and Cleopatra(1606–7). If you’re interested in any way in the history of this period, you could do a lot worse than read a book by James Shapiro called ‘1606: Shakespeare and the Year of Lear’.

There are themes that are woven into the text of Othello that resonate through centuries to the present day: revenge, racism, jealousy, love attained and love lost in the most tragic of circumstances. Many productions of this play choose to amplify and concentrate upon one or other of these themes, but this production is presented to you in way that, we hope, will allow you not only to enjoy the experience of the whole but actually make up your own mind as to what it was that Shakespeare was trying to say…if he was, in fact, trying to ‘say’ anything as we today might understand that phrase. Because, in the final analysis, Shakespeare, and the very nature of theatre in the 17^th century, was all about entertainment, bums-on-seats and giving the audiences, from groundlings to aristocracy, something at which they could laugh, cry, cheer and boo. Shakespeare understood the value of emotion in the theatre and that he wrote some of the most sublime poetry and prose in the English language is an added bonus!

Performance dates / times:

Thu 10 Oct 7:30pm

Fri 11 Oct 7:30pm

Sat 12 Oct 7:30pm

Sun 13 Oct 2pm

Tickets

Full £16

Over 60s £12

Under 16s £12

Students £12

(inclusive of all booking fees and charges)

Who are Inn Theatre Company?

What we are is a company; a group of friends who gather together to make each other, and our audiences, happy.

What we do is tell stories. Other people’s stories; stories that are specially written for us; stories that we improvise and expand upon, all through the medium of theatre.

Please note:

Inn Theatre Company are hiring Barbican Theatre auditorium for this production of Othello and Barbican Theatre as a company are not involved in the production or casting. As a hirer Inn Theatre Company set the ticket prices and available concessions. If you have any questions about ticket prices, concessions or the performances please contact Inn Theatre Company by emailing Jane Windsor-Smith, Artistic Director theinntheatrecompany@gmail.com