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Written by William Shakespeare. Directed by Nigel Shawn Williams. Until Oct. 27 at the Festival Theatre, 55 Queen St., Stratford, Ont. or 1-800-567-1600

Jealousy is traditionally understood to be the primary theme of Othello, but Nigel Shawn Williams’ staging foregrounds two of its other interrelated themes: racism and misogyny.

His Stratford Festival production is set in the present, starting with a vignette that’s not in the play: Othello (Michael Blake) and Desdemona (Amelia Sargisson) are married in a silent scene upstage, as a chorus dances centre stage to electronic music (by Verne Good, also the sound designer). Their choppy, violent motions comment on the vision of love and harmony playing out simultaneously: these modes clash and cannot coexist for long.

Denyse Karn’s set design is initially unpromising: tall off-white walls masking the familiar two-level dark wood Festival Theatre stage. But it is full of wonders: when the first scene’s action shifts to the house of Venetian nobleman Brabantio (Randy Hughson), projected drawings of columns and arches appear, the projections also designed by Karn.

They are constantly transforming the setting and mood (complemented by Kaileigh Krysztofiak’s lighting), underlying the ways in which appearances and seeming truths are always shifting. You think it’s a wall; it’s a translucent screen. Desdemona seems a loving wife, but others say she’s a cheating whore. Othello clearly presents as a heroic and eloquent leader, but he self-effaces as “rude� of speech and unsophisticated.

These seeming contradictions are there in Shakespeare’s text for every production to interpret. In Williams’ staging, as I read it, Othello talks himself down in response to the hateful racist statements that are consistently made about him. Blake’s Othello is beautifully spoken, poised and feline: in all ways attuned to the world around him. He’s succeeded by contradicting in practice the low expectations that society has of him. Which is not to say he’s crafty; he’s savvy and principled.

What’s more, he loves his wife, whom he’s known for years because he was regularly welcomed into her father Brabantio’s home and invited to tell stories of his well-travelled life. Everything was great until they fell in love and decided to marry (the connection between Blake and Sargisson is palpable and compelling), and then things turn on them because they’ve crossed a line.

Brabantio dismisses their connection by attributing it to Othello’s witchcraft — a statement that erases Desdemona’s capacity for volition and paints Othello as something extra-human, exotic and to be feared. This is the vile nexus of the combined hatred of non-white people and women which Williams’ production invites the audience to witness and contemplate.

Amongst any number of bold moves, perhaps the production’s boldest is to paint the person responsible for stirring up and instrumentalizing this hatred as not an exaggerated, extremist figure but as someone perfectly banal. Gordon S. Miller’s Iago is an average looking guy, balding, not particularly tall, kind of a Michael Keaton type, would probably fade into a crowd.

Initially, Karn’s projections and not Miller’s performance signal the roiling hatred in him: as he performs an early monologue, images that look perhaps like intestines in motion appear behind him — you can’t quite figure out what they are, but it’s definitely unsettling and more than a little disgusting.

This sense of being abject and undefinable characterizes Miller’s performance, foiling efforts to attribute his behaviour to a clear-cut psychological motive (as Philippa Sheppard’s program note reminds us, the character has its roots in the figure of Vice in medieval morality plays).

Why do people hate; why does hate exist? These are questions that the character of Iago has always prompted and while this production points to an answer — fear of anything that challenges white, patriarchal power structures — it also leaves any easy analysis of Iago’s motivation open. Miller’s well-spoken performance may frustrate some as inscrutable, while intriguing others as complex.

A related central question is why Othello starts to believe that Desdemona is unfaithful: as Blake plays it, Iago’s lies wear him down, chipping away at his capacity to hold all the complicated aspects of his life together, until he just goes under — literalized when Othello lapses into a seizure as Iago kicks back and gloats behind him. This is one of a number of moments in the production where what was happening was so difficult to process that I didn’t want to look at the stage, but this is the point Williams and his company are making: hate exists and there are consequences. We need to look; we need to act.

Another bold intervention in contemporizing the play is its foregrounding of the place of women in it. The Duke of Venice is here the Duchess, who is played in her brief appearance by Michelle Giroux as calm, wise and notably compassionate to Desdemona, holding the younger woman’s hand as she defends her love of Othello.

And the character of Emilia is here played not traditionally as Desdemona’s handmaiden but a fellow soldier alongside her husband Iago, deployed as Desdemona’s personal detail. The remarkable actor Laura Condlln works her way convincingly through the complications of Emilia’s character: she’s initially just doing her job by looking after Desdemona; communicates a carnal connection as the reason why she remains loyal to Iago despite his dismissive and sometimes abusive treatment of her; and eventually is compelled to blazing action in the horrifying, electrifying final act. The play’s startling final image compliments and pays homage to Emilia’s transformation.

Ending on a feminist note is this production’s response to a play whose intrigue spins around a society’s prurient conviction that a woman does not have the capacity nor right to control her private life. Williams’ program note dedicates the show to the victims of Christchurch and all victims of violence; given current events, it’s also speaking to the Alabama abortion law. Their world is our world, indeed.