When Iago, played by Kenneth Branagh, illustrates his game plan for his hapless victims in Oliver Parker's 1995 film of Othello, he is shown manipulating black-and-white chess pieces: the white Queen stands for Desdemona, the black King is Othello, and a white Knight on horseback serves as Cassio. In Jonathan Miller's BBC television film of 1981, the so-called temptation scene (3.3) is played in a large, bare interior space with a black-and-white chequerboard floor across which Iago moves Othello towards checkmate. In its combination of antagonism between black-and-white pieces, its requirement for cerebral plotting and its rewards for taking opportunistic advantage of an opponent's errors, chess might seem the obvious gaming metaphor for Othello.

But there is a more immediate parallel I want to suggest, as particularly, perhaps serendipitously, apposite for the themes and procedures of this complex play. In 1968 ‘Reversi’, a popular nineteenth-century game ‘of territorial occupation involving placement and capture but not movement’, was rebranded and relaunched by a Japanese toy company. The game requires the capture of the opponent's pieces ‘by enclosure and conversion’: double-sided counters, red and black in the original version and now recast in black and white, mean that the pieces can be turned to show either colour depending on which player has captured them. The new name for this game was ‘Othello’.

Why this game of capture and reversal was given this name at this particular historical juncture is open to speculation. While Shakespeare's Othello does not appear to have been particularly prominent in Japanese culture during the 1960s – indeed, it has been argued that its racial politics are incomprehensible in Japan – the choice may have been influenced by the wide- spread publicity for John Dexter's National Theatre production of the play in 1964, directed by Stuart Burge the following year on film, with Laurence Olivier as the Moor. Another, darker contemporaneity haunts the decision: 1968 was a year of particular racial tensions, with the assassination of the American civil-rights leader Martin Luther King in Memphis, Tennessee, and global coverage of the racialized nature of American society; in Britain, the right-wing politician Enoch Powell delivered his infamous ‘rivers of blood’ speech decrying immigration and calling for repatriation.