Above the thrust stage of the Tom Patterson Theatre, vertical pincer-like structures hover in the air. They’re waiting, it seems, to catch the characters below in their grip. By the time they descend, constricting the flow of the action and glowing with red embers like logs in a dying fire, we understand that we’re not watching Othello’s jealousy consume him. We’re trapped inside it.
Othello is among Shakespeare’s most laser-focused tragedies. There are no subplots and no comic relief: just the relentless machinery of a trusted ensign’s manipulations and a proud general’s descent into murderous jealousy. The special genius of Haysam Kadri’s new production at the Stratford Festival is the way it makes you feel the gears of this machinery turning right inside your chest. It does this by bleeding together the inner world of Iago’s intangible schemes and Othello’s spiraling fears with the sturdy outer world that we are accustomed to observing from without.
Brian Dudkiewicz’s remarkable set—those suspended pincers, echoed by horizontal structures that are shifted to form doorways, barriers and pathways—evolves into a landscape that is equal parts geography and psyche. Siobhán Sleath’s lighting design completes the alchemy. For most of the play, light is Iago’s instrument. It spotlights him as he schemes atop a table or balcony, then illuminates what he’s orchestrated — as with the stunning slow-motion brawl he engineers where Cassio loses his reputation, his “immortal part”.
The continuous and fluid shifting of inner and outer perspectives makes the play’s inevitable descent into madness compulsively, propulsively watchable. Right from its opening conflict, it never drags, so when the interval arrived, jolting me out of the play’s grip, I felt a twinge of genuine disappointment.
The biggest reason is the acting. Evan Buliung was born to play Iago. Clad in black leather slashed to reveal leaks of white beneath, he sounds like a Trump-era DEI foe when he discusses his rival Cassio’s advancement at the play’s start. He spits, “I hate the Moor” with a venom that echoes through the play: we notice as the dehumanizing phrase passes from mouth to mouth. He mesmerizes as he drips poison and self-justification in his soliloquies — even appealing directly to the audience, daring us, bald-faced, to find the flaws in his logic. Then he shifts to acting: bending his tongue and body language to optimize the pernicious plausibility of his arguments, with feigned reluctance and sudden, helpful-seeming ideas. It’s monstrous. It’s spellbinding.
André Sills’ Othello is the other necessary ingredient in this pas-de-deux. He enters coiled like a spring: supremely confident, self-contained, and fantastically exact in enunciating his words. He seems conscious that he is being observed, and that because of who he is, he must be better. And as Iago breaks him down with his insinuations and implications, the fraying of his composure is devastating: the piercing stares plumbing the opacity of those around him, the verbal precision now infected by volatile rage, and the tortured visions manifesting in near-seizure. It’s monstrous and spellbinding in equal measure — and heartbreaking and infuriating, too.
Desdemona has always felt to me a thankless role in the Shakespeare canon. She’s a textbook case of what comic book critics would later call “fridging,”where a woman exists to be killed as catalyst for a man’s character arc. That said, Kristin Pellerin maximizes what the text allows. Her Desdemona is slight next to the hulking Othello, but she shines brightly: pushing back with spine and conviction, confident and trusting in her love. That trust makes her murder—nasty and brutish—land as genuine loss, not a simple plot mechanism.
Jordin Hall’s Cassio matches her in solid earnestness. He is perpetually on the receiving end of events, never quite catching up, but his steadiness accrues moral weight. He grows on you. And Jessica B. Hill makes her Emilia a slow-burning revelation. Watching her piece together what’s happening—in her face, her voice, her movements and her rising alarm — is its own kind of suspense. When clarity arrives, she explodes into action, racing to reveal the truth as the lights come up full.
That final illumination is the production’s masterstroke. For most of the evening, Iago has been the show’s shadow-director, orchestrating a nasty narrative that preys on racial subtext and insecurity, and enacting it through opportunistic plausibility. But when Emilia spills the truth, the light strips away his control. The pincers hang inert. The puppetmaster falls silent. The grip releases.
Too late, of course. But what lingers for me is how understandable Othello’s fall feels from inside, where we’ve camped throughout this inventive, unsettling and compulsively watchable production.
It’s not excusable — never that. But it is human: recognizably, distressingly, and disappointingly so.
Those pincers are coming home with us.
Othello plays at the Tom Patterson Theatre through September 27, 2026. Tickets are available at stratfordfestival.ca.
© Scott Sneddon, Sesaya Arts Magazine 2026
