The saying three heads are better than one was not lost on director Sinéad Rushe, whose production of Othello at the Riverside Studios, in London, uses three actors to portray the villainous Iago. Aside from the fact that after Hamlet and Richard III, it’s the role with the most lines in Shakespeare’s canon, it also means that the character’s long, scheming soliloquies are now conversations between facets of the fractured antagonist. Staged by actors in modern dress with limited props, dim lights, and a stripped stage (a bench, a candle, curtains), the entire production is delivered in 100 terse minutes without an intermission. The result is engaging and tense, with all eyes, at all times, on the small cast of seven actors. —Bridget Arsenault