Othello (22 page)

The twentieth century confronted many of the play’s problematic qualities. Critical attitudes toward Othello were radically revised in the light of T. S. Eliot’s and F. R. Leavis’ negative assessments of the character as egoistic and self-deluding. This made traditional portrayals of Othello’s “nobility” difficult and tended to further accentuate the role of Iago. Race and racism became an issue in casting the play.

The African American singer and actor Paul Robeson played Othello at the Savoy in 1930 in a production hampered by a set and lighting that left the actors upstage and in the dark. Despite Robeson’s imposing physical presence, Herbert Farjeon described him as “the under-dog from the start. 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:

4.
“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:

Welles’ 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:

As another critic put it:

Since 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.”
³⁷

In 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 body
⁴⁰
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 Michéal MacLiammóir 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 in the theater.

Not by accident, Othello has a long history of audience intervention: of performances in which someone, forgetting that it is only a play, has stood up and tried to warn Othello against Iago, or to proclaim Desdemona’s innocence.
⁴⁴

And yet, Othello has a rather checkered past in performance with very few productions touching that raw nerve, the open wound, that we sense when reading the play. Sexual jealousy was obviously something that Shakespeare understood well: Leontes’ perplexing and irrational jealousy in
The Winter’s Tale
; the strong emotional evidence we find in the
Sonnets
. There is an extraordinary realism in the behavior and feelings expressed in these works. Onstage, however, the problem lies not with believability, but with the two central characters. It has proved difficult to find two actors of equal strength and a director who can maintain the balance between them. If Iago dominates too easily, it can be detrimental to the actor playing Othello, diminishing the magnificence of the character so the impact of his fall is lessened.

Until recently, the actor playing Othello has had the further barrier of convincingly portraying a man of a different race, blacking up and adopting characteristics that can appear as racial stereotypes. As critic Michael Billington pointed out, this has led to fewer performances and a diminishing of the play’s place among the greatest of tragedies: