Othello

The cares of ‘Old Man River’ were still upon him. He was a member of a subject race, still dragging the chains of his ancestors.”³⁰ Peggy Ashcroft as Desdemona and Sybil Thorndike as Emilia were both praised for their performances. When Robeson came to reprise the role with greater success at the Shubert Theater, New York, in 1943 as America’s first black Othello, he is reported to have told the director, Margaret Webster, that looking back on the earlier production he had felt so “overwhelmed by the thought of playing Shakespeare at all, especially in London, with his unmistakable American accent, that he never reached the point of looking Othello squarely in the eye.”³¹ Webster’s influential and hugely successful production focused firmly on the issue of race and racism, permanently changing attitudes to the play.Meanwhile, Tyrone Guthrie cast Ralph Richardson as Othello in his 1938 production at the Old Vic with Laurence Olivier as Iago. Guthrie and Olivier, influenced by Freudian psychology, saw Iago as motivated by repressed homosexual desire. The critics were generally severe:Mr. Ralph Richardson…plays the Moor with skill, dignity and taste. He has a beautiful voice, and speaks his lines with understanding. But he fails to be heroic; his Othello inspires no awe; we are sorry for him, but we do not feel the profound pity that should extend from him to the whole condition of man; and the tragedy dwindles into a thriller about a villain who ruins an amiable and well-bred simpleton. The excessive mildness of the Othello is aggravated by the excessive liveliness of the Iago…We are shown, not a lion killed by a viper, but a virtuoso toreador playing a bull. And it is his exquisite accomplishment that we concentrate upon, not the blind processes of the victim.³²4. “It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul”: Paul Robeson, the first black actor since Ira Aldridge to play Othello in London, with Peggy Ashcroft at the Savoy, 1930.

Orson Welles’ 1951 production at St James Theatre, in which he starred and directed, attracted equally unflattering reviews. Blacking up by white actors, while not yet regarded as unacceptable, was now a source of humor:The glad cry “The coalman cometh!” was suppressed with difficulty when Mr Orson Welles came on the stage as Othello, clad in a sooty costume of familiar cut that greatly amplified his already impressive frame…Mr. Welles is a stiff actor, apparently limited in gesture and expression, but he has dignity and a commanding voice. The speech to the Senate, spoken very quietly and naturally, is extremely effective and in the early scenes at Cyprus there is no question of Othello’s military authority. But when he is on fire with jealousy Mr. Welles can only stand as if stunned, his eyes fixed and glaring. Then he looks lost, passion and poetry missing.³³Welles’ film of the production the following year won first prize at the Cannes Film Festival.In 1956 at the Old Vic, John Neville and Richard Burton alternated the roles of Othello and Iago, but neither managed Othello satisfactorily. John Gielgud played the part in Franco Zeffirelli’s 1961 Stratford production. Despite the beauty of his vocal delivery, Gielgud was generally considered miscast. Three years later, Laurence Olivier played Othello in John Dexter’s production for the National Theatre’s inaugural season. Olivier famously did painstaking research on his voice and appearance. The production caused a sensation: “Many loved Olivier’s performance. Many loathed it. No one could ignore it.”³⁴ Doubts might be cast upon his preparations but not the power of his performance:Whether the Negroid physiognomy which Olivier was at such pains to create was necessary to establish this character I take leave to question…But of the cathartic power and visible splendor of the performance there can be no doubt whatever.³⁵As another critic put it:It could have been caricature, an embarrassment. Instead, after the second performance, a well-known Negro actor rose in the stalls bravoeing. For obviously it was done with love; with the main purpose of substituting for the dead grandeur of the Moorish empire one modern audiences could respond to: the grandeur of Africa. He was the continent, like a figure of Rubens’ allegory.³⁶Since then, performances of the play with white actors blacking-up have become increasingly problematic. Donald Sinden at Stratford in 1979 and Paul Scofield at the National in 1980 attempted it, but, as Julie Hankey records, both “actually raised laughs at some of Othello’s extravagant moments.”³⁷In the earliest productions of the play, race does not seem to have figured largely—the main focus was on rank, the undoing of a superior by a malevolent subordinate. Judged in the light of the West’s subsequent history of colonialism, it has become increasingly difficult to mount a successful production. The Ghanaian-born actor Hugh Quarshie has argued that the play is in fact inherently racist and that no black actor should attempt Othello.³⁸ The most successful recent productions have, however, cast black actors. In America, James Earl Jones first played Othello in 1964 at the New York Shakespeare Festival. His lack of classical training was seen as an obstacle that he was able to overcome “in the force and integrity of his delivery.”³⁹ Reprising the role at the 1981 American Shakespeare Festival, Jones had grown in the part, although it was Christopher Plummer’s Iago who gained most of the plaudits. Janet Suzman staged a production in apartheid South Africa at the Market Theatre, Johannesburg, in 1985 with John Kani as Othello, Richard Haines as Iago, and Joanna Weinberg as Desdemona as a deliberate challenge to the government’s political ideology. It played for six weeks and was hugely successful with black and white audiences alike.In Terry Hands’ 1985 production for the RSC, Ben Kingsley played Othello to David Suchet’s sexually ambiguous Iago. Much was made at the time of the rather pale-skinned Kingsley’s mixed African-Indian heritage. In 1989 the Jamaican-born operatic bass-baritone Willard White was cast against Ian McKellen as Iago at the RSC’s The Other Place. Sam Mendes cast David Harewood as Othello against Simon Russell Beale’s Iago at the National Theatre in 1997. Two years later, Michael Attenborough directed Ray Fearon and Richard McCabe in an RSC production. In 2001, Doug Hughes cast Keith David as Othello and Liev Schreiber as Iago at New York’s Joseph Papp Public Theater. In 2004 Gregory Doran directed the black South African Sello Maake Ka-Ncube as Othello, with Antony Sher as Iago. The RSC productions are discussed below in more detail, but it would be fair to say that in all of these Iago was seen as dramatically more successful, begging questions about the balance between the roles in the writing and the policy of color-blind casting that now paradoxically applies to every role except Othello. Othello has become a superb opportunity for black performers, offering a breakthrough role for rising stars (such as Chiwetel Ejiofor in Michael Grandage’s Donmar Warehouse production of 2008, with Ewan McGregor as Iago) and a change of direction for established figures (such as Willard White the opera singer and, in 2009, the comedian Lenny Henry, who was directed in the role by Barrie Rutter for Northern Broadsides). But it is, for now, a part from which white actors are barred. Jude Kelly’s “photo-negative”Othello in 1997 in Washington, D.C., with Patrick Stewart’s Othello as the only white cast member proved an interesting experiment while hardly providing a long- term solution.Given the increasingly problematic nature of conventional productions, it is not surprising that a number of radical revisions, adaptations, and offshoots have been produced, including Murray Carlin’s Not Now, Sweet Desdemona (1969), Jack Good’s rock opera Catch My Soul (1970–71); Charles Marowitz’s An Othello (1972), Paula Vogel’s Desdemona: A Play About a Handkerchief (1979), Djanet Sears’ Harlem Duet (1997), Caleen Sinnette Jennings’ Casting Othello (1999), Andrew Davies’ updated television adaptation Othello (2001), and Tim Blake Nelson’s film “O” (2001). The most successful adaptation is undoubtedly Giuseppe Verdi’s operatic masterpiece Otello (1887) in a genre which does not pretend to realism.A wide range of film versions are available, including a fascinating 1922 German silent movie directed by the expatriate Russian Dimitri Buchowetzki, starring Emil Jannings and Werner Krauss. Orson Welles’ 1952 film took four years to make owing to financial difficulties; using a heavily cut text and Welles’ characteristically adventurous camera work, it was much more successful than the stage version. Russian director Sergei Yuttuvich produced his Russian adaptation in 1955 with Sergei Bondarchuk as Othello. In 1964, Stuart Burge filmed John Dexter’s National Theatre production with Laurence Olivier, Frank Finlay, and Maggie Smith. Olivier’s performance, while undeniably powerful, is disturbing in its appropriation of the black body⁴⁰ and looks dated. Trevor Nunn’s (1990) RSC production at The Other Place with Willard White and Ian McKellen, with an American Civil War setting, fares better than Jonathan Miller’s for the BBC starring Anthony Hopkins in the same year. Oliver Parker’s 1995 film with Laurence Fishburne as Othello and Kenneth Branagh as Iago was highly acclaimed but is problematic in its own way: “Parker configures him [Othello] as a fascinating and useful outsider in Venice, a man whose power carries hints of an eroticism, derived from his arresting physicality…less the supreme exemplum of Venice than an exotic misfit within it.”⁴¹ However, the film belonged to Branagh. As one critic put it: “Kenneth Branagh doesn’t just steal the show; one suspects he might have sat in the director’s chair as well.”⁴²

AT THE RSC“Haply, for I am black”The great Irish actor Micheal MacLiammoir called Othello the “most passionately human of all Shakespeare plays.”⁴³ Diving into a wealth of painful emotions, Shakespeare offers us an intense exploration of human relationships and frailties. By focusing on a limited number of characters in a claustrophobic setting there is no relief for the audience, who witness helplessly the vile destruction perpetrated by the worst emotional vandal in English literature. When done well, this can be an agonizing and almost unbearable experience