Othello is a man trusted with war, but denied full belonging. This contradiction lies at the heart of Qëndrim Rijani’s production at the National Theatre of Albania. Visually astonishing and emotionally precise, the performance opens Shakespeare’s tragedy through the wound of the foreigner, showing how jealousy gains power when it touches a place already made vulnerable by exclusion.
Rijani’s approach to Shakespeare is based on the confidence that the classical text can still breathe in its own world, if the director opens a passage through which today’s audience can enter it. The performance begins in a contemporary world. Roderigo (Florian Agalliu) appears as a young motorcyclist and boxer, a figure of masculine frustration, while the Duke of Venice (Artan Imami) is seated in a wheelchair, connected to an IV drip and speaking through a microphone. Power here is almost on life support, yet it still commands armies, bodies, and destinies.
From this opening frame, the production gradually moves toward the Venetian and Shakespearean atmosphere through the sea-storm sequence leading to Cyprus. The transition unfolds through rhythm, costume, movement, music, and atmosphere, so smoothly that it feels almost like a theatrical illusion. This movement returns the tragedy to the roots of mechanisms that remain painfully present, including patriarchy, hierarchy, possession, honour, violence, and fear of the foreigner.
That movement through time finds its physical form in Valentin Svetozarev’s scenography, one of the production’s major achievements. Built from metal structures that form bridge-like corridors, square frames, mobile panels, and an elevator at the back of the stage, it suggests both a military fortress and an industrial mechanism. Dirt and clay placed within these square spaces soften the coldness of the metal, allowing the scenography to belong both to Shakespeare’s world and to ours. Scenes shift through the structure with remarkable fluidity, while details such as Desdemona’s empty bed, the elevator, the shower, and the chairs are fully integrated into the action and charged with symbolic meaning.
Marija Papuchevska’s costumes mark time, rank, role, and belonging, moving from contemporary military and urban codes toward a Venetian aristocratic world of luxury, ceremony, and hierarchy. The frequent costume changes, especially for Othello and Desdemona, turn each appearance into a new visual statement and help the performance travel through time without losing coherence.
Endri Sina creates a rich musical palette that remains dramaturgically precise, moving from the almost operatic and philharmonic grandeur built around Othello’s name to the live sung Shakespeare sonnets during the wedding celebration, performed with the energy of rock music. Bianca appears as the singer, while Cassio joins her through voice and stage energy, and Genti Deçka’s virtuosic live guitar gives the scene a strong electric pulse. Later, Julia Stone’s “Winter on the Weekend” gives Desdemona’s death its most fragile emotional temperature, carrying the chill of wounded love and failed protection.
The choreography by Artan Ibershimi functions as dramaturgy in motion. Movement reveals what words cannot always carry, making relationships readable through distance, approach, touch, hesitation, and bodily rhythm. The sea storm is one of the clearest examples. On a largely static stage, the actors’ collective movement, supported by scenography, lighting, and sound, creates the sensation of a shaking ship. The fight scenes involving Cassio, Roderigo, and Iago, together with the physically charged relationship between Cassio and Bianca, further show how movement becomes a language of danger, collapse, and care.
Arben Derhemi gives Othello authority and confidence from his first appearance. His slow, controlled movements, voice, and posture suggest a man formed by experience, discipline, and command. With Desdemona, this authority softens, revealing one of the few places where his strength becomes gentle. Although this Othello is not visually marked by blackness, Derhemi’s stricter expression, weighted costumes, and controlled physical power make his difference from the surrounding world clearly visible.
Once jealousy is planted in him, the same body begins to lose its architecture. His movement becomes faster, more restless, and less controlled, as Derhemi turns jealousy into a disturbance of the whole organism. His tenderness toward Desdemona hardens into cruelty. This transformation reaches its most explicit bodily form in the two epileptic episodes that Rijani stages from Shakespeare’s reference to a second fit. During the first, Othello’s fears take shape through an imagined intimacy between Cassio and Desdemona and the image of Iago placing her handkerchief on Cassio’s fishing hook. False evidence becomes bait for Othello’s imagination, creating one of the production’s most powerful visual compositions. After the second episode, the thought planted inside him appears stronger than his judgment.
The murder of Desdemona is staged with devastating clarity. Black dirt covers Othello’s face and spreads over his eyes, as if jealousy has darkened him from within and destroyed both his vision and his capacity for clear judgment. His kiss leaves a black mark on Desdemona, while his scream after smothering her becomes the emotional breaking point of the performance.
In the final moments, Othello tries to wash away the darkness, but the act remains. Desdemona returns as a spirit and gives him dirt, returning him to the material of his destruction. After his suicide, the handkerchief is placed over his face, completing the object’s tragic journey. The token of love that became false evidence now becomes almost a shroud over the man who allowed its meaning to be transformed into death.
Desdemona (Linda Jarani) appears with a grace that immediately separates her from the harsher world around her. Her long blond hair and magnificent costumes create an image of aristocratic fragility, while subtle changes in posture, voice, face, and hands reveal the gradual breaking of a woman whose world begins to tremble under the pressure of distrust.
At first, she carries ease and confidence beside Othello, while her sincere warmth toward Cassio makes their innocence clear. Their fingers touch almost like a promise, a pure gesture that Iago turns into suspicion. As the tragedy advances, Jarani lets pain emerge through the body. Her posture bends, her voice shakes, and her hands tremble uncontrollably. The white costume, later marked by Othello’s blackened kiss, makes the tragedy painfully visible. The stain remains on her body, but never reaches the love with which she chose him.
Iago (Lulzim Zeqja) is the performance’s dynamic force. He seems animated rather than burdened by evil, enjoying the game and trusting his own intelligence completely. His envy and pleasure in the suffering of others emerge through quick shifts of gesture, expression, tone, and rhythm. Zeqja presents Iago as the psychological strategist opposite Othello, the military commander. Othello knows how to conduct war outside himself, while Iago creates war inside another man, arranging evidence and reality until others begin to lie to themselves. The added image of Iago cutting out his own tongue gives brutal physical form to Shakespeare’s final silence. The man who destroyed others through words destroys his own instrument of speech, returning the tragedy to language as poison, insinuation as weapon, and silence as final violence.
Cassio (Donald Shehu) is shaped through a remarkably clear and physically detailed performance. The character is more than the instrument through which Iago manipulates Othello. Shehu traces a visible arc of collapse, from confidence and social security to desperation, bodily instability, and almost complete loss of self-belief. After the drunken incident, Cassio’s body changes, while the costume changes follow this fall closely, reflecting the ups and downs of a man whose honour and position are gradually shaken. Shehu makes the transformation precise and convincing. Lowered, unstable, and at moments almost crawling on the floor, his Cassio becomes a man whose self-image has been destroyed.
Bianca (Krist Lleshi) receives far more space than Shakespeare’s text usually allows, and she fully justifies it. Her stage presence is vivid, open, and captivating. Through her care for Cassio, the production creates a second love story, very different from Othello and Desdemona’s, one marked by greater bodily immediacy. Bianca follows him, supports him, encourages him, and tries almost physically to straighten him when he falls apart. She believes in Cassio at the very moment when he can no longer believe in himself.
Among the director’s most striking additions is the final scene given to Cassio and Bianca, where Shakespearean references merge into a new vision of justice, blood, and loyalty. In this reading, Cassio is the man who assumes command after blood has been spilled, while Bianca is a courtesan from the margins of Cypriot society, easily judged and reduced to her past. Their bond survives the prejudices that suffocate the other couples, making them the unexpected counter-image to Othello and Desdemona, and to Iago and Emilia. They remain a darker, blood-stained image of loyalty, care, and belief.
Viktor Zhusti gives Brabantio one of the performance’s most painful emotional lines, moving from restless disbelief at Desdemona’s escape to his spirit-like return beside her dead body. This directorial intervention echoes the Ghost of Hamlet’s father while reversing its dramatic function. In Hamlet, the father returns to awaken his son and set the action in motion. Here, Brabantio arrives after protection and salvation are no longer possible, becoming an image of recognition and grief that comes too late.
Roderigo, Emilia, Lodovico, and Montano complete the production’s world with distinct and carefully drawn presences. Florian Agalliu keeps Roderigo physically expressive beyond the opening, especially when his masked and deformed body shows how completely Iago can reshape another person for his own design. Emilia (Luli Bitri) gains her greatest force in the final scenes, when her voice breaks through the machinery of lies with the urgency of truth arriving too late. Lodovico (Genti Deçka) and Montano (Alert Çeloaliaj) bring authority and definition to the aristocratic and military order into which Othello is both included and excluded.
What stands out again is Rijani’s ability to shape the ensemble as a living theatrical body, together with the actors’ skill and commitment to giving that structure life. Their energy, concentration, and investment remain on a consistently high level, so even when certain roles carry stronger dramatic weight, the stage never feels uneven. This is one of his greatest strengths as a director, the ability to give each performer a clear function within the larger rhythm of the production, while keeping the whole stage synchronized, alive, and fully present.
Rijani’s interventions reveal a director who knows how to think with Shakespeare, not merely around him. Brabantio’s spirit-like return beside Desdemona opens a passage toward Hamlet, while the brutal moments near the end, Bianca’s silencing, Iago’s self-mutilation, and Cassio taking justice into his own hands, push the performance toward the macabre. These interventions remain firmly connected to the tragedy itself. The echoes of Macbeth and The Merchant of Venice bring forward what is already latent in Othello, including the violence of language, the body as the final place where suspicion settles, and justice as something that can easily become another form of brutality. The idea that Iago’s hatred of Othello is also fed by the ideology of a “pure state” opens another political shadow within Shakespeare’s world, toward Julius Caesar. Together, these connections strengthen the sense that Rijani understands Shakespeare as an interconnected world of power, debt, blood, guilt, desire, political order, and punishment.
The aesthetic in this production is bold, visually charged, and physically intense, with every element carefully placed within the larger structure. Rijani brings Shakespeare to the stage by trusting the text and building a stage language strong enough to meet it. The performance moves through contrasts between the contemporary and the historical, the ceremonial and the intimate, beauty and the macabre, public power and private collapse. Its richness remains readable because the visual intensity never separates from the emotional line of the tragedy. It is the kind of performance one would want to experience again, to return to its layers, details, connections, and emotional aftershocks.
Othello from the National Theatre of Albania opens one of Shakespeare’s greatest tragedies to today’s audience and makes its contemporary relevance powerfully visible, while preserving its tragic depth. Othello’s fall is never reduced to jealousy alone. The production reads jealousy through the wider wounds that make it possible, through exclusion, fragile belonging, social suspicion, and the vulnerability of the foreigner whose authority is recognized, but whose equality remains uncertain. What stays with us is the terrifying image of a man who wins wars in the world outside him, only to be defeated on the most intimate battlefield of all, the one opened by a thought planted inside his own mind.
Credits:
National Theatre of Albania
Director: Qëndrim Rijani
Set design: Valentin Svetozarev
Costumes: Marija Pupuchevska
Composer: Endri Sina
Choreography: Artan Ibërshimi
Assistant Director: Trista Lulo, Ulpianë Maloku
Cast:
Arben Derhemi- Othello
Lulzim Zeqja – Iago
Linda Jarani – Desdemona
Viktor Zhusti – Brabantio
Luli Bitri – Emilia
Donald Shehu – Cassio
Artan Imami – Duke of Venice
Florian Agalliu – Roderigo
Genti Deçka – Lodovico
Alert Çeloaiaj – Montano
Krist Lleshi – Bianca
📷 Erald Nalbani
