This paper investigates Gholām-Hossein Sāedi’s appropriation of Shakespeare’s Othello in his seminal play Othello in Wonderland. The play is worth investigating since it disentangles itself from the Shakespearean logocentric tradition to depict the plights of Sāedi’s fellow artists at a critical point in Iranian history. It is argued that Sāedi’s self-exile following the 1979 Revolution enabled him to present a critique of censorship and the authoritarian demands of the hegemonic power of the time. Sāedi’s artistic concerns, which are temporally and locally constrained, result in an autonomous Othello in which different discourses compete with each other in a class struggle among members of a theatrical group, agents of a hegemonic power and Sāedi the playwright. While this paper is principally concerned with how Sāedi’s adaptation deterritorializes the source text to challenge the official power and unfold marginalised voices, it finally discusses the applicability of Sāedi’s criticism to modern times.
