Desdemona, Park Theatre

Exciting farcemaestro-upstarts the Big Bear Theatre Company are bringing one of our hottest fringe tips to the Park Theatre this spring. 

A new production of Desdemona, Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Paula Vogel’s ‘deliciously demented version of Othello’ is coming to the Finsbury Park space in May. 

This vicious comedy gives a new voice to Shakespeare’s tragic heroine, her maid Emilia and the local prostitute Bianca. It explores these ‘secondary’ characters as beings of unbridled sexual desire who must reconcile this with a sixteenth century society that treats them as the second sex.

Lurching from tales of Desdemona’s conquests in her husband’s military platoon to the complicated relationship of trust and betrayal she strikes up with the young, painfully naïve Bianca, this ‘play about a handkerchief’ tracks the forging and fissuring of a complex, unlikely relationship between three very different women and the men they desire. 

Tinkering with Shakespeare has its pitfalls, but we have enormous faith in Vogel’s sensitive and courageous approach to theatremaking. Her 1997 play How I Learned to Drive won her the Pulitzer Prize for Drama with its devastatingly frank examination of the impact of sexual abuse on children, while her acclaimed Baltimore Waltz play, a set of dark comic vignettes scored through with tragedy, centres on the experience of losing her brother to AIDS in 1980s.