It also fulfils Kelly’s remit of persuading People Like Uz into theatres – even if they are only on the stage. This new Othello, in regional accents, by the director Barrie Rutter and the Halifax-based company Northern Broadsides, could make Lenny Henry the first famous Dudley Moor. Whereas “Uz”, she said in proper Yorkshire, are the people the Playhouse wanted to welcome. “Us”, she explained in a put-on, posh-provincial accent, are the people who are supposed to go to the theatre and read Literature and attend books festivals in grand marquees in southern England. Some years ago at a somewhat posh literature festival in the provinces I heard the then artistic director of the Playhouse, Jude Kelly, explaining what she understood by the phrase People Like Us. “I’m black, I’m from Dudley, I’m working class. “It seemed to me that Shakespeare was very much in the province of posh people,” he said on a Radio 4 series about the Bard. Two years before making his serious stage debut as Othello at the West Yorkshire Playhouse, Lenny Henry summed up his attitude to Shakespeare.
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