The lights dim as the night begins to wrap itself around the audience of the Roman Theatre in Verona — but it’s not just nightfall that descends: it’s the heavy shadow of jealousy, manipulation, selfishness, and blind power that turns into violence… against women, and against the “other.”

This Othello, staged as part of the Estate Teatrale Veronese, is a powerful reinterpretation of Shakespeare’s masterpiece. Directed by Giorgio Pasotti with modern, minimalist, and emotionally charged vision — and backed by a script written by Dacia Maraini — the production gains a sharp sense of urgency and relevance.

Here, Iago is pushed into the background — a quiet puppeteer, yes, but one orchestrating a tragedy that was perhaps bound to happen either way. Pasotti renders him a cold, calculating presence, whose eerily calm voice soon turns unsettling. At the center are Desdemona and her Othello — it is their passion, their stormy emotions, that command the stage.

Othello, confident yet precariously poised between love and insecurity, between passion and fear of inadequacy. Actor Giacomo Giorgio masterfully portrays the fragility of a man whose pride leads him into the abyss of doubt and devastation. His Othello is torn by uncertainty, lost among shadows and silences, unable to distinguish truth from the poison of deceit. The voices in his head become a storm. When he kills Desdemona, it is not merely to punish — it’s because he no longer knows how to live with his pain. He does not listen. He closes every door, and in doing so, silences a voice, extinguishes a light, ends a life.

This is an Othello not ruled by jealousy, but one consumed by madness — a man who is also “the other,” a young man with skin too dark to be fully accepted as Venetian, yet who “speaks Venetian better than many who claim to be so.” Beside him stands Desdemona — sweetness and courage — played brilliantly by Claudia Tosoni, a woman destroyed by a brutal, male-dominated system.

Timeless costumes and a sparse yet evocative set create a sense of suspension, as if to say that Othello’s tragedy could happen anywhere, at any moment. Pasotti’s direction avoids grand theatrics, instead focusing on glances, silences, and subtle tensions that speak louder than words.

The ensemble cast delivers with poise and precision:

• Davide Paganini as Roderigo embodies possessiveness;
• Gerardo Maffei as Brabanzio (Brabantio) represents an archaic society, terrified of what’s different;
• Andrea Papale plays Cassio, a symbol of the new kind of man — one standing up so the newspapers headlines might finally begin to change;
• Dalia Aly is Emilia, under Iago’s control, but ultimately choosing to speak out, to stop staying silent as society expects.

Then there’s the icing on the cake: Salvatore Rancatore as the Doge (Duke of Venice) like no other — entering the stage while singing “I Want to Break Free”. He’s more concerned with his appearance than what’s happening around him. His language, sprinkled with anglicisms, becomes a mirror of modern power and cultural elitism.

But perhaps the true protagonist of this staging is the mirror.
There’s the literal mirror — a vertical structure borrowed by Pasotti from Josef Svoboda’s “La Traviata of Mirrors” (1992) — allowing the audience to enter a dual dimension of performance, breaking yet another theatrical taboo: that actors must never turn their backs to the crowd.

And then there’s the abstract mirror — Otello and Iago as reflections of each other, two sides of the same coin. At the end, with the bodies of the two women lying lifeless on stage, the two men stare at each other, as if looking into their own reflections.

With this production, Pasotti and Maraini place Shakespeare firmly in the hands of contemporary audiences, transforming Othello into a searing drama about femicide, about hatred festering in silence, and the vital need to see through the masks we wear.

In the final moments, the Duke of Venice — riding through the stage on his scooter — weaves between the women’s bodies, breaks the fourth wall, and looks straight at the audience. The reckoning has arrived. And with his offbeat demeanor, he delivers a masterstroke — a line meant to haunt us, just as Iago’s words haunted Othello:

“Do you really think this story has nothing to do with you?”

The spectators in the front rows see themselves reflected in the vertical mirror, and tonight, more than ever, theater doesn’t just move — it confronts.
It asks:
Who is our Iago?