You can make the case that Othello’s handkerchief is the most consequential prop in all of Shakespeare. Yorick’s skull and Macbeth’s floating dagger are more iconic, but neither is integral to the action of the plays in which they feature. The handkerchief, on the other hand, really is the whole of the tragedy of Othello.

And I do not mean that in a purely mechanical sense. It is a plot device, but it is also a living motif. It circulates through the hands of all the principal characters: from Othello to Desdemona to Emilia to Iago to Cassio and back again. In a drama where the dominant poetic quality, as G. Wilson Knight famously observed, is separation, the handkerchief acts as a necessary counterforce, holding the characters in their fatal circuit.

In this new Melbourne Shakespeare Company production, directed by Tanya Gerstle, the handkerchief appears much earlier than usual. The play opens with two soldiers on patrol. A woman is pursued. Cornered by one of the soldiers, she waves a white cloth as if in surrender. Then she is murdered. The other solider appears and is apparently moved by her death. He takes up the handkerchief and carries her off stage.

The men are Iago and Othello, we assume; but who is the woman? We don’t know. In this radically stripped-back Othello, this is the only backstory we are given for the handkerchief. All other mentions of its origins have been cut. And so the cloth functions as a naked symbol of the violence done to women by men. It enters the play as the material trace of a history of cruelty and that modifies every exchange thereafter.

After this prelude, Iago, played by Dushan Philips, steps downstage and addresses us directly. With the character of Roderigo excised, along with many other, his confidences have no stooge; his hatred of the Moor is confessed to us alone. Philips is cool and insinuating, and his soliloquies manage something very cunning: they slide us into Roderigo’s vacant place. Flattered, coached, we become his audience of choice, and his dupes.

This is a production that suggests intimacy with a smiling psychopath. It is as though we are trapped with him in a small, bare cell and all the other characters are figments of his cruel and pornographic imagination. His running commentary – what he plans and how he will do it – sets limits on what we can see and judge. Our perspective narrows to his.

Gerstle exaggerates this effect of narrowness by paring away much of the play’s picaresque imagery: the exotic colour, the baroque flourishes, most of the romance. What remains is grittier, darker, with less amplitude. The pacing is taut rather than diffuse. Our sense of place – whether Venice or Cyprus – is completely blotted out.

Individual performances have the same severity. Lines are spoken stiffly, often haltingly, with little relish for whatever remains of Shakespeare’s lush vocabulary. The cast land most emphatically on the commonest words: man and woman. These are struck repeatedly, like drums, heightening their significance and focusing the drama on power and gender.

Dushan Philips is a brisk and muscular Iago. He keeps his body in motion, changing his position, his voice and his temperature. He seems to draw inspiration from the play’s bestial imagery – springing like a goat, sliding like a serpent, crouching like a toad – always transforming. His large, looped gold earrings swing freely like small charms, gleaming as he moves.

In this production, Iago’s misogyny is unmistakable. He hates the Moor, yes, but his contempt encompasses Desdemona. The story is bookended by his murders – the anonymous woman of the prelude and, at the close, Emilia – both played by Lucy Ansell. He is calmly hateful, but also fascinated by the effects of his scheming, as when he looks on with half a smile as Othello writhes on the ground in agony as if impaled on a pin.

Christopher Kirby’s Othello – lean and rather battered – tends to yield the centre to Iago. He speaks in staccato, clipped phrases, feeling his way through the remains of the text as if through a dark thicket, advancing cautiously. When the ground finally gives way, he runs: the delivery loosens and he becomes more turbulent. The grand set-piece speeches – ‘farewell the tranquil mind’ or ‘methinks it should be now a huge eclipse’ – tumble from his mouth. He is very much the traumatised veteran.

Dashan Philips as Iago (photograph by Nick Robertson )

Casting Tanya Schneider as Desdemona erases something of the difference in age with Othello. Schneider plays her with a warm, faintly maternal solicitude. Again, what is emphasised is the plain fact of a woman subjected to male violence.

Lucy Ansell, meanwhile, is a lively Emilia. Desdemona’s maid can often seem like the most contemporary voice in the play because of her cynical, pragmatic views on marriage, her awareness of gendered injustice, and her ultimate defiance of her husband. And in Ansell’s interpretation we get a fresh sense of that freedom of mind.

With Philips as Iago and Ansell as Emilia, the emphasis tilts slightly away from racial animus. Race remains constitutive: skin colour still anchors Shakespeare’s oppositions of fair and black, light and dark, citizen and outsider. But in this staging Iago’s hostility feels less absolutely imbricate with race because his malice falls just as readily on the women.

There is much I might wish were different here, though mostly at the margins of what I think is a strong concept. Matt Furlani’s Cassio reads less as a competent lieutenant than Chekhov’s eternal student, Trofimov, who has blundered into the wrong play. The second-hand books in piles around the stage feel like unnecessary clutter. And the costumes are so ordinary that rehearsal blacks might have served better.

This is nonetheless a compelling production: an austere adaptation that plays like a grave little oratorio for five voices. At ninety minutes it is very compact, but it has a force and clarity of vision that cannot be denied.

Othello (Melbourne Shakespeare Company) continues at fortyfivedownstairs, Melbourne, until 28 September 2025. Performance attended: September 12.