Authors: William Shakespeare
Othello (23 page)
The RSC has not had a white actor playing Othello since 1979, but opinion is still heavily divided as to whether it would be acceptable at all in the twenty-first century to have an actor blacking up. With theater audiences made up of predominantly white, middle- and upper-class people, Bob Peck, who played Iago in 1979, pointed out that
The controversial element in the play is the way in which an inter-racial marriage is used to force an audience, whose own prejudices are put into the mouth and actions of a very seductive and persuasive villain, to adopt a moral attitude towards its events.
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Donald Sinden blacked up for the role of Othello in the RSC’s 1979 production directed by Ronald Eyre.
Writing a year later, this production’s Othello, Donald Sinden, was sometimes alarmed by audience reaction:
We tell ourselves it is usually those who are not very bright who feel it but I wonder…you felt sympathy going to Iago, you were fighting to keep that sympathy. They were nearly cheering him, egging him on, go on there, get the black man, like goading a bull. It was really sinister. All that talk of majesty and dignity in Othello meant nothing right here in Britain in 1980. They thought “He’s black and a bloody fool to try and make it anyway.”
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In 2004, Gregory Doran chose two South African actors who had been brought up under apartheid to play Othello and Iago, Sello Maake Ka-Ncube and Antony Sher.
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Sello Maake Ka-Ncube as Othello in the RSC’s 2004 production directed by Gregory Doran capitalized on his African cultural heritage and the experience of growing up under apartheid in South Africa.
Their experiences of living under a racist regime informed their performances, as Ka-Ncube explained:
Certainly the play has powerful resonances for me as someone who grew up under Apartheid, but being an artist is always about taking risks and being black—whether you grew up in South Africa under Apartheid or in Manchester or as an African American—is about being at risk all the time. That’s something you live with in a world that is defined by white men’s standards.
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Reviewers picked up on this in his performance:
… Ka-Ncube’s Othello…wears an African beaded necklace under his jacket and, even before you glimpse that, you sense a trace of cultural uncertainty beneath his proud, assured air. Though he doesn’t flinch when his enraged new father-in-law accuses him of bewitching Desdemona, his abstemiously blank expression—eyes front—suggests this is not the first time he has taken racist flak. His own references to his unpolished speech sound genuinely self-deprecating, making his susceptibility the more credible when he is encouraged to doubt Desdemona’s love.
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Sher used genuine examples of racist behavior he witnessed in his past:
[something] we both use, which perhaps would not have come to us if we were not both South Africans, is when you really start to blow, when you say: “Arise, black vengeance.” I remember, in rehearsals, you began reverting to an almost tribal ancestral behaviour, as if you were summoning the ancestors, which you do with stamping. That allows me, when you have your epileptic fit and are unconscious at my feet, to mimic and mock your tribal behaviour. That again, to me, feels very much from the South Africa of our youth, where white people would mock black people, or would simply not take you seriously, but would see something clown-like or apelike in that behaviour.
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The understanding that these two actors had of living in an overtly racist society obviously benefited them when tackling the play, producing powerful performances. However, most actors who have played Othello, black and white, don’t consider the play a “tragedy of racism”—crimes of passion, after all, are committed by all races. Nevertheless, it is Othello’s “otherness,” the fact that he is an outsider, which gives Iago the advantage when working on his insecurities.
Ray Fearon, who played Othello in 1999, believed that the issue of race is essential but that having an actor of power was the most important thing:
I don’t believe in giving black actors the role. You give it to actors who are credible. You get someone of quality. But Othello says,“I am Black.” You can’t get round that. He’s black in a world of white people, insecure, other, paranoid. Only his blackness makes sense of the play. Because I’m black, I know how he feels. When I wear a pea cap and trainers, people just see me as a stereotypical black man. That attitude is going to take a long time to go away.
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Fearon being much younger than the traditional Othello, lines had to be cut with reference to age, but the sexual chemistry between Othello and Desdemona was much more pronounced:
Fearon is not the most profound of Othellos, but, thanks also to Waites’s unaffected warmth, he is one of the most touching. I have seen more distraught Moors, but few who wailed and gasped and touched their Desdemonas with more feeling. It is not just a case of killing the thing he loves, but of hardly being able to let her out of his arms. And he compensates for his lack of weight by growing in charisma and fire. The man who half-drowns Iago in a ewer, or follows his furious yell of “goats and monkeys” with a torrent of spit directed at the wife he has just whacked round the chops, is not to be fooled with.
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The physicality of the play in its displays of affection and violence also makes it practical to have a black actor in the part of Othello, as Trevor Nunn, who directed a production for the RSC in 1989, pointed out:
Not only for political reasons, but for reasons of integrity to the play, and sheer theatrical practicality. A play that’s so overwhelmingly about male-female relationships needs a physical relationship between Othello and Desdemona. And with a white actor in black make-up that’s the one thing you can’t have. If they touch each other, Othello comes off on Desdemona.
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In Nunn’s production Othello’s vocal control set him apart as much as his color:
Willard White, the black opera bass cast as Othello, often seems to be the only person on stage speaking verse, his utterances as rhythmically distinctive as his rich, dark vocal register. He gives life to the old cliché about “the Othello music”: this towering, Negro general is as alien to the Venetians in his speech as in his physical appearance.
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In 1985, Ben Kingsley was the first non-Caucasian actor to play Othello at Stratford since Paul Robeson in 1959. Playing opposite David Suchet, the two actors were physically similar, dark-eyed and bearded, causing many critics to comment on the fact. Kingsley himself felt that “Othello and Iago are almost two faces of the same man…They are both suffering from the same psychological disturbance”
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—hence Iago’s ability to manipulate someone whom he understands completely. Although the set was abstract in design the costuming went for authenticity:
Terry Hands’s production, and especially its costumes…reflect an Elizabethan society that used violence to achieve its ends and heroes to spearhead its conquests…The starting point for Kingsley’s preparation was indeed a Moor and more particularly the portrait of the Moorish Ambassador to the court of Queen Elizabeth I.
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All reviewers mentioned the impressive impact of Kingsley’s first entrance as an Arab Moor:
On to the stage of midnight black, with everyone on it wearing black, steps a strange aloof figure in a dazzling white robe. A grey bearded ancient, mysteriously smiling, he might be some grave Indian mystic on a visit to an unknown planet.
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He enters with solemn tread, wins the Senate over with humor (even clicking his teeth as he talks of “the cannibals that each other eat”) and dotes crazily on his Desdemona. This is a man, ageing and ringlet-locked, who has invested all his happiness in a young bride…and who is thrown into chaos by doubt.
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A Military Life
From a technical viewpoint,
Othello
makes no special demands in staging. The emotions tapped in the play—love, hate, jealousy, envy—are so elemental that elaborate settings may actually detract from the bare display of them. Scene changes are likely…to break the momentum…The realism of the play lies in its emotional development, not in scenery.
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This statement was proved when in 1961 Franco Zeffirelli staged
Othello
in full Venetian splendor. Elaborate sets with massive scene changes may have given the stage the genuine look of Renaissance Italy, but killed the sense of claustrophobia and unstoppable momentum, and completely dwarfed the actors’ performances.
One of the major difficulties has been to balance the play’s public dimension with the personal space of private emotion:
The gradual narrowing of the play’s locales is but one contributor to the play’s remorseless focusing on the personal lives of the main characters: life in the great Mediterranean city contracts to a beleaguered island and its frightened populace, then to the rooms in Othello’s headquarters, and then to the marriage bed round which the curtains are finally drawn to shut out the sight of the pain that can ultimately be only personal.
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Ralph Koltai, designer of Terry Hands’ 1985 production, went for a minimalist interpretation. The characters were in Elizabethan dress, but the setting consisted of a black stage with “smoked-perspex screens edged with gold,”
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behind which sat “sculptural emblems of a Cypriot crucifix later replaced by a dangerously resting gold lion,”
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an emblem of Venetian imperialism.
There is little stage furniture, scarcely any attempt at social realism. A few flickers of light on the back wall suggest Venice; the storm that marks Othello’s arrival at Cyprus, brilliantly taking its cue in a welcome suggestion of diabolism from Iago’s “Hell and night / Must bring this monstrous birth to the world’s light,” is the only big production number: lights blindingly flash, the noises of thunder are theatrical rather than natural. The overall effect of the design … is to release the play from local associations and to put the focus very much on the actors, who perform urgently, with a high degree of psychological realism.
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Starting with John Barton in 1971, most recent productions have emphasized the military setting of the play. Thus the public element remains without taking away from the intimacy of the action. With this genuine sense of army life we get important distinctions in rank from costume, rules of conduct influencing characters’ behavior, and the isolating effect of the army barracks on Desdemona.
Julia Trevelyan Oman, designer of the 1971 production set in the nineteenth century, was influenced by early war photographs from the Crimea and American Civil War:
They represent the past, but the near past, and the uniforms and background details still have a poignant reality and emotional appeal for us…I see Cyprus as a remote dusty army outpost cut off from civilisation, and Othello himself as a soldier as different in manner and dress from the other professionals in his army as Napoleon or Rommel from theirs.
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In this barrack atmosphere, heavy with the celibate fantasies of men herded together in heat, it’s easy to understand why Othello should trust his senior NCO more than his new bride from home; how jealousy might crackle through his imagination like fire through a dry thorn-bush. Meaning is restored to the play’s talk of honour, reputation. Where else, today, but in the Army could we accept a drunken fight spelling disgrace for Cassio or a man regarding his wife’s infidelity as the ruin of his career?
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Michael Attenborough’s 1999 production used an Edwardian militaristic world with special attention paid to the inevitable tensions and jealousies of army life:
Cyprus feels like a British colonial outpost with soldiers in red tunics, Desdemona in a muslin dress and army bands playing in the distance: as in
Much Ado
, it strikes me that Shakespeare understood the peculiar danger of the aftermath of conflict when leisure afternoons are filled with malice and mischief…it is the military context that gives resonance to [Richard] McCabe’s wonderfully observed Iago…When Cassio taunts him with the fact that the lieutenant must be saved before the ensign, you see a look of pure hate, quickly masked, flash across McCabe’s eyes….
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