Cast announced for Northern Stage's Othello
Northern Stage has confirmed the full cast and creative team for a new production of Othello, directed by Anthony Almeida, ahead of its opening in Newcastle next month.
The production is a co-production between Northern Stage, HOME Manchester and the Citizens Theatre, in association with Royal & Derngate. It will run at Northern Stage from 11 to 26 September 2026, before transferring to a UK tour.
Almeida's staging reframes Shakespeare's tragedy as a study of assimilation, relocating the action to Britain in the early 1980s. Set against the backdrop of the Falklands War, the production finds Cyprus reimagined as an isolated military outpost, where professionalism, appearance and belonging carry significant weight. The production explores how love, loyalty, race, class, gender and power are shaped by the everyday performances that allow people to belong, or leave them isolated.
Speaking about the production, Almeida said: "I don't think Othello is really a play about jealousy. Jealousy is the symptom. The tragedy begins much earlier - in the tiny acts of adaptation, restraint and performance we all make in order to belong. I realised Shakespeare hadn't written a play about jealousy at all. He'd written a play about behaviour. Once we began looking through that lens, everything changed.
Setting the play in Britain during the early 1980s wasn't about making Shakespeare contemporary. It was about finding a society where appearance, professionalism and belonging carry enormous weight. I became less interested in public politics than private intimacy; less interested in certainty than perception. Four hundred years after Shakespeare wrote it, the questions at the heart of the play still feel astonishingly urgent. They're questions about who we become when we believe we have to perform in order to be accepted - and what happens when those performances finally collapse."
The cast
Dwane Walcott takes on the title role of Othello. Walcott is a stage and screen actor whose recent theatre credits include Hot Wing King, ANNA and Damned by Despair (National Theatre); A Streetcar Named Desire (Almeida/West End/BAM Theatre, NYC); Machinal (Almeida); Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare's Globe); Moonlight/Night School (Harold Pinter); One Night in Miami and Coriolanus (Donmar Warehouse); Henry V (Regent's Park); The Iphigenia Quartet (Gate Theatre); Hamlet (Barbican); The Twits (Royal Court); Titus Andronicus, A Mad World, My Masters and Candide (RSC); Romeo and Juliet (Stafford Shakespeare Festival); Torque (Bush Theatre); and The Fiddler & Life on the Stairs (Faith Drama Productions). His television credits include Saviour (ITV), Believe Me (ITV), A Town Called Malice (Sky Max), Enterprise (BBC), Into the Badlands (AMC), Our Girl (BBC), Doctors (BBC) and Tut (Spike). On film, he has appeared in The Thing with Feathers and Mindhorn (Scott Free/BBC Film).
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Dwane Walcott
Photo: Ivan Weiss |
Maanuv Thiara joins Walcott as Iago. Thiara most recently starred in the third series of ITV's Trigger Point, having been made a series regular in the second series. He also featured in Sky's Under Salt Marsh, Ben Wheatley's Generation Z for Channel 4, and Apple's Prime Target, directed by Brady Hood. Before that, he co-led Jed Mercurio's ITV drama DI Ray alongside Parminder Nagra, for which he was nominated for a Best Actor RTS Award. Other credits include Will Sharpe's Landscapers for Sky and HBO, Apple's Ted Lasso with Jason Sudeikis, Sky's Brassic, BBC Two's The Boy With The Top Knot (directed by Lyndsey Miller), and series five of Jed Mercurio's Line of Duty. In theatre, Thiara most recently appeared in John Morton's Eclipse at Chichester. Before this, he starred in the Olivier Award-winning Boys on the Verge of Tears at the Soho Theatre, Guards at the Taj at the Orange Tree, and Vinay Patel's adaptation of The Cherry Orchard at the Yard. He has also featured in Indhu Rubasingham's production of The Father and the Assassin at the National Theatre, in the West End transfer of Hamlet alongside Andrew Scott, and in A Passage to India at the Park Theatre, directed by Sebastian Armesto. Other credits include Trojan Horse, winner of an Edinburgh Fringe First and the Amnesty Freedom of Expression Award in 2018, The Funeral Director at Southwark Playhouse, and Approaching Empty at the Kiln Theatre. Thiara also voices Daddy Rhino in the animated television series Peppa Pig.
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| Maanuv Thiara |
Phoebe Smyth makes her professional theatre debut as Desdemona. A recent graduate of LAMDA, Smyth is a founding member of Mycelium Theatre Company, with whom she co-devised and performed A Microscopic Odyssey at Theatre503 and the Golden Goose Theatre. Mycelium has since been invited to perform at the Theatre Networking Talents Festival in Romania and the Pleasance Courtyard at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Smyth has also starred in Frayed, a short film nominated at the Independent Shorts Awards. Her theatre work while training includes Romeo & Juliet, Liolà, and 1972: The Future of Sex and New Labour.
Rebecca Banatvala plays Emilia. Her theatre credits include Summerfolk (National Theatre); Much Ado About Nothing (Royal Shakespeare Company); Northanger Abbey (Orange Tree); Autumn (Park Theatre); I Fcked You in My Spaceship* (The Vaults); The Island (Cervantes Theatre); Sap (Edinburgh Fringe & Soho Theatre); Habibti (Maybe She's Born with It) (Lyric Hammersmith); Rotterdam (Hartshorn Hook, UK Tour); The Three Musketeers (The Dukes, Lancaster); Mary Stuart (Embassy Theatre); and Mrs Puntila and Her Man Matti (Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh). Her television credits include EastEnders, Vigil and The Syndicate (BBC), Emmerdale (ITV) and Love, Death and Robots (Netflix). On film, she has appeared in Prima Facie, which premieres at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, and The Princess Switch 3. Her radio credits include Snares (BBC Radio 4).
Grace Hodgett Young plays Bianca. A graduate of Mountview Academy of Theatre Arts, her credits include Punch (UK tour), Sunset Boulevard (Savoy Theatre/St James Theatre), Eurydice in Hadestown (Lyric Theatre), and What It Feels Like For A Girl (BBC/Hera Pictures). Hodgett Young won The Stage's 2024 Debut Award for Best Performer in a Musical and the 2024 WhatsOnStage Award for Best Professional Debut, both for her performance as Betty Schaefer in Sunset Boulevard, a role for which she also received a 2024 Olivier Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress in a Musical.
Chris Garner plays Brabantio. His screen credits include Coronation Street, In From The Side, The Children Act, The Hunt for Raoul Moat, Emmerdale, Mistresses, The Royal, Medics, Casualty, Rich Tea and Sympathy, Made in Heaven, and EastEnders. His theatre credits include Macbeth Alone (National Tour); Calendar Girls (Frinton); War Horse (National Theatre); The School for Scandal (Bristol TF); The Country Girls and Antony and Cleopatra (Chichester); King Lear (Leeds Playhouse); 1984 (Northern Broadsides); Black Heart of Petty Malice (Soho, London); Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme (Hampstead Theatre); and Henry VI Part 3 (RSC National and International tour). His radio work includes Home Front III, War of the Worlds, Windscale, Abel's Law, The Radetsky March, If Not Now, When?, Hiawatha, Dear Little Burney, In a Summer Season, Going Clear and My Uncle Freddie.
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| Chris Garner |
Will Stanton makes his professional theatre debut as Cassio. Trained at LAMDA, Stanton's recent work has focused on screen, including an upcoming Disney+ production. Originally from London and now based in Newcastle, Stanton enjoys exploring the outdoors, keeping active, and describes himself as passionate about storytelling in all its forms. Reflecting on the role, he said returning to Shakespeare has been both a rewarding challenge and a reminder of why he first fell in love with acting. |
| Will Stanton |
Matthieu Sys completes the cast as Roderigo. Sys was selected from an open casting call of more than 200 actors. He trained at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre in New York, and joined the US theatre company Sponsored by Nobody before becoming a long-standing member of the internationally acclaimed theatre company Ontroerend Goed, with whom he has toured extensively worldwide. He also appeared in 300 el x 50 el x 30 el by Silver Lion-winning theatre company FC Bergman. His screen credits include leading roles in the acclaimed Belgian series In Flanders Fields and Amigos, appearances in both the Belgian and UK versions of Professor T, and the feature film The Pod Generation.
The creative team
The production's creative team is completed by designer Natasha Jenkins, sound designer Matthew Tuckey, lighting designer Sinead McKenna, video designer Erin Guan, movement/fight/intimacy director Giaele Mattioli, production manager Suzie Normand, costume supervisor Sara Mackenzie, and casting director Karishma Balani.
This marks director Anthony Almeida's first Shakespeare production. Recognised for bold reinterpretations of classic texts, Almeida's opera work has received international acclaim, with Heroïne for Opéra national de Lorraine named among Le Monde's productions of the year and praised by leading European critics, including Opernwelt. He is the only director to have received both the RTST Sir Peter Hall Director Award and the European Opera Director Prize, and has been nominated for the International Opera Awards' Rising Star Award and The Stage Debut Awards' Best Director. He has previously served as Resident Director at both the Almeida Theatre and the Royal Opera House.
The tour
Following its run at Northern Stage, the production continues on tour to:
- HOME, Manchester: 30 September – 10 October
- Royal & Derngate, Northampton: 13 – 17 October
- Theatre Clwyd: 20 – 24 October
- Citizens Theatre, Glasgow: 27 October – 7 November
- Derby Theatre: 10 – 14 November
- New Theatre, Peterborough: 17 – 20 November
Ticket details
Othello runs at Northern Stage from 11 to 26 September, with a press night on 16 September at 6.00pm. Tickets can be booked through the Northern Stage box office on 0191 230 5151 or online at www.northernstage.co.uk.
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