If you're an adventurous reader I invite you to skip this introduction and go straight to the puzzle (you can always come back). What follows is a very brief (and mostly spoiler-free) introduction to the productions discussed in this chapter – both directed by me and both of Othello, the first, a ninety-minute adaptation of Shakespeare's called Othellophobia and the second, almost a decade later, an all-male, original practices production – and an orientation into the main, performative body of the chapter, the Sudoku puzzle. One of the initial driving ideas behind the Othellophobia production was to have a Matrix-style fight as figuratively expressive of the struggle between Othello (played by a master of t'ai chi ch'uan and capoeira) and Iago (a black belt in karate) in the temptation scene (3.3), though given Iago's clear superiority as a covert strategist, such a fight might have resembled a rope-a-dope, but without its famous punch-line. This production was conceived as a research project at University College Winchester (UCW), where I was a Lecturer in Drama, and the cast was made up of professional and student actors. Both of the two versions of the production were framed by the idea of the action as Brabantio's monster and beastfilled nightmare: the first version (2003) moved seamlessly between a real and fantasy world, whereas the second version (2004) began in a real, recognisably modern world and then shifted into the timeless, if historically rooted, nightmare. It was a production which took a heavy emotional toll on me and which I felt was in some respects not just a failure, but the antithesis of what I had set out to achieve, but it was these and other difficulties which made the writing up of the experience, at least for me, so compelling: these writings make up the majority of this chapter (pp. 54–62). I swore I wouldn't return to the play, but in 2013 I did just that, albeit with a completely different kind of production. This original practices production, a staged reading put together in a week, was a joy to work on. Reflections on this production of Othello (pp. 63–65) are offered as an intertextual coda to the material on Othellophobia.

I must, I suppose, defend, or at least explain, the form of this chapter, the Sudoku puzzle.