In a Shakespeare adaptation , performance or appropriation of your choice identify the core interpretations of race and identity.

Andrew Davies, 2001 adaptation of a fellow rework Shakespeare's play so the focal center of the film is race and identity. By readjusting, the Shakespeare play to modern London, the adaptation reframes, the Venetian Othello. Into John Othello, the new commissioner of the Metropolitan police in London. Despite the progressive nature of society this film highlights that race and the issues that surround it are systematic and permeate despite the progression of society from shakespearen times. A extremely focal point of the film being John fellow navigating into a previously white occupied position and institution his authority is conditional and fragile.

The police higher-ups only grant him the position initially due to him quelling a racial dispute and riot in the first place, believing it will serve them to put a man of colour at the forefront of the police. "the Lawrence case gave him the idea of making his John Othello the first black commissioner of London Metropolitan Police, thereby also mounting a tangential critique of the government’s cynical

administrative strategies." (Sankar, 2024, p.4) the mirroring of real world, hierarchies and racial minorities in powerful positions very much agree with the initial storytelling of a fellow being both an insider and outsider, while transmuting it into something digestible for a modern and contemporary audience. The police force being a mirroring of the army and general positioning, Othello had.

The modern fellow adaptation seems to lean into the specific focus on race with John being very proud of his heritage and his own personal identity, seeming to relate and understand to the people on the street with there being a very intense contrast of the higher police settings featuring the shadia characters in the narrative and the every man who are seen rebelling at the beginning. "Othello is portrayed as knowing the people in the streets better than any other person. He has a special relationship to the streets, a space of social disorder and chaos." (Parpală, 2017, p.177). A fellow is shown carefully managing his behave speech and demeanor towards the people of the streets, and also to people within the institution knowing his acceptance, depends entirely on how he conduct himself due to the nature of his race. His identity is not fixed, but constantly negotiated and shaped by the people surrounding him in contrast with his now subordinate Iago whose whiteness allows him to operate, almost invisibly.

Davies' Othello presents race as a construct but with real and tangible consequences and less so something just attributed to a person. While the actions of Othello do insight the ultimate demise of himself. They are a product of the way society views him specifically Iago. Its message is very powerful, but also seemingly overwhelmingly negative framing society as being trapped as perpetually kept behind due to its own constructs and ideas. In choosing to do this, the 2001 adaptation invites the audience to question self and the relationship that they have with race and the institutional way society works.