I am saddened by Walterdale Theatre’s decision to cancel its upcoming production of Shakespeare’s Othello, the story of a Moorish general in the Venetian army who is the victim of a manipulative plot to separate him from his wife, Desdemona, who is desired by a nobleman, Rodrigo.

I am not sad to be missing Walterdale’s, um, inventive and modern interpretation of the 400-year-old plan. I’m sad because rather than go ahead with its controversial (to say the least) production, Walterdale has caved into threats it claims to have received online and in-person.

Before I go any further, let me be clear: Walterdale is run by volunteers. It is not a big budget place. No one is getting rich off its productions.

So if Walterdale’s board of directors, staff and performers felt unsafe as a result of the threats – the full nature of which have not been disclosed – then I will not fault them for cancelling the play that was set to open next week.

It just would have been nice had they stood up for their right to free expression in the face of bullying by anonymous detractors.

While no one at the theatre company will confirm or deny it, the threats seem to emanate from someone’s belief that it was racist of Walterdale to cast a woman in the role of Othello, a part typically played by a man of colour.

Most often in the past, the role has gone to a black or brown man because the Moors were mostly North African. Indeed, so ingrained is the idea that Othello is either black or brown that until the 1940s and 1950s, Othello was most often played by a white male wearing blackface. (That’s another racial controversy of its own for another day.)

However, Walterdale cast a woman, Linette J. Smith, to play Othello. And that is where their troubles began – not mostly because Smith wasn’t male, but because she wasn’t black.

The theatre’s hope, apparently, according to Smith, was to spark a “discussion about women in power roles, a conversation about the marginalization of women and normalization of differently gendered relationships.”

Egad. Most productions of Othello run to more than 2:30 long. That’s a long time to be clubbed over the head by a message about gender politics.

Maybe Walterdale could have pulled that off and provoked the debate they desired, but more likely it would have been the equivalent of spending three hours with knitting needles in your eyes.

Granted, not every production of Shakespeare must be Elizabethan in look and tone. But most modernized stagings are so ham-fisted and over-the-top about their “subtle” political message they have become clichéd.

But knowing now that Walterdale had been threated for daring to try something different, I would have gone to see their Othello as much to support them against those who would silence them as to see whether they could actually make their politically charged plot changes work.

There is a line in the play, uttered by Othello himself (or is that herself?) about having the courage of speaking out against intimidation, “I hold my peace, sir? no/No, I will speak as liberal as the north (wind)/Let heaven and men and devils, let them all/All, all, cry shame against me, yet I'll speak.”

I hope it is not too late to restage the play. It is important for artists to challenge authority, cultural convention and norms, even if they nearly always do so from a lib-left perspective.

The right for them to express themselves freely took too long to win to be given away easily.