Hip-hOpthello: Sydney Festival’s Othello: The Remix

I’ve never had the opportunity to study Othello, either at school or at university. In fact, my first knowledge of the play came when I saw the Reduced Shakespeare Company’s The Complete Works of William Shakespeare [Abridged] (in which all thirty-seven plays are performed in ninety-seven minutes) when I was twelve. Apart from teaching myself Hamlet’s ‘To Be’ soliloquy backwards, and their glorious conflation of the Comedies, the only thing I remember from it is their Othello Rap. Enter, then, Sydney Festival’s presentation of Othello: The Remix, by the Chicago Shakespeare Theatre in an Australian exclusive. Not only is it, like the Reduced Shakespeare Company’s song, surprisingly accurate, but it too is enormous fun and is something of a masterstroke.