While Forrest was playing Othello in the United States and England, the first black Othello, Ira Aldridge, played to packed houses across Europe, having previously played the role to acclaim in the English provinces and, for just two performances in April 1833, on the stage of Covent Garden in London. Touring in the years after the revolutions of 1848, Aldridge’s performances were enthusiastically received, although criticism of his “naturalness” often suggests unconsciously racist attitudes: “In the role of Othello Mr Aldridge was extraordinary—he is a genuine tiger and one is terrified for the artists who play Desdemona and Iago, for it seems that actually they will come to harm.”27Henry Irving was another actor who found that Othello eluded him. In the 1881 Lyceum production he alternated Othello/Iago with Edwin Booth. Despite their different styles, Booth’s traditional, classical style versus Irving’s more modern naturalism, both actors won praise as Iago while disappointing as Othello. However, Irving’s was recognized as “emphatically a new Iago,”28 decisively changing attitudes to the role:Mr. Irving’s Iago conceals his inherent vileness and depravity under a frank, soldierly, swaggering manner. His reputation for honesty becomes readily intelligible; it arises from his rude, frank air, now cynical, now convivial, yet always really malevolent and vicious.29The 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: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 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.44And 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:Othello has lately become the odd man out among Shakespeare’s tragedies. Current racial sensitivity makes it virtually impossible to have a white actor blackening up as the hero.45The 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 thatThe 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.465. 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.”47In 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.6. 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.48Reviewers 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.49Sher 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.50The 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.51Fearon 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.52The 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.53In 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.54In 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”55—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.56All 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.57He 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.58
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