Shakespeare’s tragic hero Othello morphs into a 1970s black schoolboy in Tracy Chevallier’s reworking of one of the Bard’s most powerful plays.
The betrayed Moor of Venice becomes Osei, a Ghanaian student who joins a new, all-white school in Washington, DC, and has to navigate the petty bigotries of the playground.
This is not the first time Shakespeare has been updated into a school-set tale – Heath Ledger’s 10 Things I Hate About You, for example, was a Generation Y retelling of The Taming of The Shrew.
Chevalier’s backdrop of primary/junior school relationships and the loneliness and challenges of the new student trying to forge friendships strikes a chord even without the additional and pivotal racial backdrop.
But ultimately it struggles to convince, and some of the child dialogue feels pretty unconvincing. Ten Things had the benefit of being based on a 16th-century comedy.
Othello is a hard, brutal and grown-up drama of love, anger and betrayal that struggles to adequately be portrayed in New Boy.
