On 24 October, a newspaper announced that ‘under the sanction of His Excellency, The Governor … This Evening the amateur company will perform the Tragedy of Othello with the musical farce The Poor Soldier.’ The combination of main-course tragedy with a farce or comic opera for dessert (this one by the Irish playwright John O’Keeffe) was entirely standard in the period, and, as I had discovered in California, would last happily for decades yet. Try as I might, though, I could find out no more of this Liverpudlian attempt on Shakespeare’s play, or whether the ‘gentleman’ played Othello or Iago (my guess was the latter, it usually being regarded the better role).
In 1829, another visiting Englishman, H. Booth, gave what the Cape Commercial Advertiser regarded as a ‘judicious and effective performance’ in the lead, offering extracts alongside Romeo and Juliet and Richard III. Other Othellos followed in 1831 and 1833. In 1834 an amateur company attempted it once again, their lead actor praised for his ‘dignity and feeling’ in ‘several of the most trying scenes’.
As I read about these early performances, one thing struck me: that no one seems to have an inkling that the racial politics of Shakespeare’s play had anything to do with those of the emerging South Africa. From scant paragraphs in a few newspapers, it wasn’t clear whether this was wilful blindness or a fact so obvious it barely needed repeating. Whatever the truth, Othello became one of the most popular Shakespeare plays in the colony.
In 1836, yet another new version appeared, translated into Cape Dutch. This time there is no mistaking its intentions: the title was Othello, of de Jaloersche Zwart (‘Othello, or the Jealous Black’) and was perhaps based on a popular – and shamelessly racist – parody that had circulated in the Netherlands. Judging from a letter sent to the Commercial Advertiser, the show provoked strong feelings among audiences. The correspondent fulminated:
In frequenting the theatre, do not professing Christians pointedly violate their baptismal vows? … In listening to … Othello, do they not unnecessarily contract a horrible familiarity with passions and deeds of the most fiendish character … and give up their minds to be polluted by language so gross? Is not the guilt of such persons great, and their danger imminent?
The language was straight out of the English sixteenth century, or the American seventeenth: zealots like Philip Stubbes and Stephen Gosson were forever railing against the pestiferous iniquities of stage-players. (Stubbes’s own formulation was that plays were incitements to ‘idleness, unthriftiness, whoredom, wantonness, drunkenness, and what not’, which sounded pretty good to me.)
But in this talk of ‘passions’ and ‘grossness’ the issue took on a nasty new topicality whose origins were not hard to intuit. Slavery had been abolished on the Cape two years before, in 1834, a fact that left many bitter that their ‘property’ was being taken away by a remote and lordly British government. That black characters should appear on stage was not merely damnably un-Christian – it was a damned insult.
Productions of Othello kept coming – ‘the defining dramatic expression of South African society in the Shakespearian canon’, in the words of Rohan Quince, an authority on South African theatre history. Another version was staged courtesy of a Dutch society in 1837, this time with Iago played by ‘a Gentleman lately arrived from India’ (European, it is fair to assume); then again in 1842, remade as an ‘operatic burlesque’ with men playing both Othello and Desdemona (again, both white). Here the play’s racial context was acknowledged, albeit for laughs – Mr Macdonald’s Desdemona won applause for his ‘little endearments towards his black “hobby” [husband]’. Iago was reportedly played as a buffoonish Irishman, another kind of racial slur. The show was riotously popular.
What lies behind the rib-nudging tone of these accounts becomes clearer when the celebrated Victorian actor Gustavus V. Brooke visited Cape Town in 1854. A scheduled performance of Bulwer-Lytton’s The Lady of Lyons was quickly replaced with Othello, because, the advertisement read:
[Othello is] better understood here than any of Shakespeare’s plays. Its hero (a coloured man) who has moved and won a white lady, ships, bays, soldiers, a castle, and a governor, being all familiar to the Colonists’ ear, ‘as household words’.
The tone was larksome – a coloured man who marries a white woman! – but it nonetheless signalled a hardening of attitudes.
In the twentieth century, real life would make a nonsense of anything that Shakespeare depicted on stage. The beginning of the apartheid era is conventionally dated to 1948 and the victory of the National Party, but the word apartheid (‘separateness’) was first used by Afrikaner racial theorists as early as the late 1920s.
One landmark piece of legislation was the first incarnation of the Immorality Act (1927), outlawing ‘extramarital carnal intercourse … between whites and [black] Africans’. This was later enlarged to cover all sexual relations, married or otherwise, between whites and any other race. Othello’s subject matter – with its depiction of a marriage between a black man and a white woman – became, in effect, illegal. The play was never officially banned, but was increasingly regarded as too controversial to stage or even teach. In Port Elizabeth in 1962, it was removed from high-school courses.
The Population Registration Act of 1950 divided South Africans into three racial groups, in steeply descending order: white, coloured and black (‘Bantu’), with a fourth category, Indian, added later. ‘Coloured’ designated someone who was mixed-race, usually descended from Europeans who had had relationships with black Africans or slaves, but in practice the term was notoriously imprecise, applied to anyone who didn’t look ‘white’ enough. Under the Separate Amenities Act of 1953, theatres were segregated. This legislation was further toughened by the various Group Areas Acts and regulations imposed in 1965, which stipulated that ‘no racially disqualified person may attend any place of public entertainment’ – outlawing both mixed audiences and mixed casts, not to mention mixed sport, music or any other cultural activity.
Although during apartheid the majority of Shakespeare performances were played by white actors in front of white audiences (even, on rare occasions, Othello), courtesy of politically conscious performers Shakespeare began to become involved with the struggle. As was the case in communist Eastern Europe, one attraction was that subversive political messages could be smuggled into ostensibly uncontroversial texts – almost impossible for the authorities to object if the script was by the deadest of dead white males. It is an irony worth enjoying that some of the strongest Shakespearian responses to apartheid were staged by Afrikaans-speaking directors and actors in state-funded, whites-only venues.
One of the most mischievous was the German-born director Dieter Reible, who in 1970 broke the newly initiated cultural boycott to work in South Africa. Reible’s Afrikaans production of Titus Andronicus was set in a fascist Roman state with clear contemporary echoes, and lingered – to the obvious discomfort of some critics – on the passionate love affair between Queen Tamora of the Goths and the black character Aaron. The following year, Reible used King Lear to go even further. Although the rules required the actors to be ethnically white, Reible made liberal use of make-up and set the play in something resembling a Zulu or Xhosa village, knowing full well that President Fouché would attend the premiere. Incensed, one paper suggested that Reible should apologise for this grave affront to the president’s dignity (and that of his wife).
Another Afrikaans-speaker, the playwright André Brink, made grim comedy out of apartheid with a 1971 version of The Comedy of Errors called Kinkels innie Kabel (‘Twists in the Cable’), set in a fishing village on the Cape. Cleverly using Shakespeare’s twins to poke fun at the ludicrous divisions of the system, it featured a skit on the fact that in real life South Africa had recently dispatched not one but two candidates to the Miss World competition (‘Miss South Africa’ and ‘Miss Africa South’). After a performance by all-white performers, the play was staged in the comparative freedom of Cape Town’s Little Theatre, with a racially mixed
cast in front of integrated audiences.
But it was Othello that provoked one of the most thoughtful critiques of apartheid. In the same year, 1971, the British playwright Donald Howarth moved to South Africa, setting himself up in a tiny flat in Hillbrow. Horrified by the death of the activist Ahmed Timol, murdered in police custody that October (officers claimed Timol had voluntarily thrown himself out of a tenth-floor window), Howarth wrote a play called Othello Slegs Blankes (‘Othello Whites Only’), its title referencing the signs plastered on everything from drinking fountains to beaches. Although the script was never intended to be staged, the playwright was persuaded to put it on at the newly opened Cape Town Space in June 1972.
Though the Space evaded the regulations forbidding mixed casts by setting itself up as a ‘private club’, Howarth’s version operated as if the laws had the same force in the auditorium as they did outside on the street. Othello, deleted from the cast list, never once appears; his lines are parcelled out among the rest of the cast, one of whom is a police informer who conspires to kill Desdemona. On going into the theatre, audiences were handed an official-looking form by a man dressed as an immigration officer. ‘Are all the persons concerned in the presentation of the play of pure white descent?’ it asked.
Shakespeare’s Othello, though a tragedy, scatters behind it a few seeds of hope: Iago is eventually unmasked and arrested; Othello realises his tragic mistake and dies kissing the dead Desdemona on the lips. Howarth allowed his South African audiences no such consolation. Here Lodovico, the Venetian official who arrives to take charge at the end, doesn’t simply refuse to punish Iago – he promotes him, in words of stinging irony:
From now on his power and his command
Shall be vouchsafed in honest Iago, deserving
Champion of our discriminating laws,
Watchdog and defender of our principles.
Othello Slegs Blankes, wrote one critic, helped ‘lay bare the absurdities that so many of us accept as commonplace’.
Inspired by the example of Cape Town’s Space, in 1974 an actor and director of Jewish-Lithuanian extraction, Barney Simon, and Mannie Manim, a white producer and lighting designer, decided they wanted to create a similar theatre up in Johannesburg. Free of government involvement, it could give a home to black writers and actors who couldn’t find outlets for their work. Perhaps most importantly, audiences would be desegregated and tickets priced at a level even the poorest could afford.
When Simon and Manim came across the dilapidated shell of what had been the Indian fruit market in the inner-city area of Newtown, they decided this would be their new home. The Market theatre, as it was named, opened with a production of Chekhov’s The Seagull in June 1976 – the same month as the student-led Soweto Uprising, which led to nationwide protests that left nearly 600 dead. Soon it was being called ‘the theatre of the struggle’; soon after that, South Africa’s unofficial national theatre.
In its early years the Market established a reputation for contemporary, politicised work – Woza Albert! (1981), which satirically reimagined the second coming of Christ in apartheid South Africa; scripts by Athol Fugard, whose Sizwe Banzi is Dead and The Island, created in collaboration with young black actors, presented lacerating depictions of the passbook system and long-term incarceration.
But in 1987 – the same year Shakespeare Against Apartheid came out – the Market staged a performance that would become famous internationally, and suggest, as Orkin had done, that classic writers could also comment powerfully on the cruelties and injustices of the South African system. The show, again, was Othello.
The production had come about when Janet Suzman, a Johannesburg native of Jewish heritage (and niece of the famous anti-apartheid campaigner Helen Suzman), who had made her name as an actor with the Royal Shakespeare Company, decided she wanted to use the experience she’d gained in Britain to assist in the struggle. She planned to work with John Kani, one of the actors who had collaborated with Fugard on the protest scene. She wanted to do something bold: cast a black African as Shakespeare’s Moor.
It wasn’t quite the first time that a black actor had played Othello on a South African stage: four years earlier, in 1983, Joko Scott took the role in a cut-down production directed by Phyllis Klotz in Cape Town, with a cast of just six. But the Market version became a watershed, partly because of Suzman’s contacts overseas but also the symbolic resonance of the venue.
And Othello had, Suzman argued, only become more apposite. By 1987 the Immorality Laws had been repealed, but were still fresh in everyone’s minds; Shakespeare’s portrayal of a lawful mixed-race marriage that cracks under the pressure of circumstance seemed, if anything, more clairvoyant. It would be impossible for the censors to object, given that the script was penned by the greatest playwright in the English language.
The major worry, Suzman later told me, was whether Othello would sell tickets. Shakespeare had barely been done at the Market before. Would an audience reared on hard-hitting protest drama cope with a 380-year-old play in Jacobean English done in doublets and hose? Would the cast? Would anyone even turn up?
In the event, when Othello opened in September 1987, it provoked a firestorm. Almost literally – after threats from right-wing organisations, the auditorium had to be swept for bombs. There were audience walkouts. Hate mail was sent by the sackful, much of it to the blonde, white actor playing Desdemona, Joanna Weinberg. There was a scandal when a photograph of Suzman with her arm around Kani was printed on the cover of the South African Airways in-flight magazine. A member of parliament fulminated that ‘allowing a photograph of a black man and a white woman in close proximity’ was ‘integrationist policy’ by stealth.
South African critics – white, mostly – were equally wary. One declared that Suzman had committed a momentous error in ‘allowing Othello and Desdemona to exhibit their sexual bond in public’. Kani, who had won a Tony award on Broadway for his work with Fugard, was accused of ‘making mincemeat’ of the Bard’s immortal verse. One critic dismissed the production for its ‘patronising liberalism’. Another wrote, ‘One is almost tempted to side with [Iago].’
But the international press, starved of good news about South Africa, was overjoyed. The New York Times proclaimed that ‘it has broken new ground here both on and off the stage’. Reviewing a recording of the production later broadcast on British television, a critic proclaimed Kani ‘the most moving Othello I have ever seen’. The Guardian’s review was headlined simply, ‘The Moor Who Speaks for a People’.
Far more importantly, South Africans came in their droves – around 40 per cent of them black, a higher percentage than had ever been seen for a European classic at the Market. There were stories of people travelling up from Cape Town, nearly 900 miles, to see it. The theatre management were stunned. ‘Had we known how successful it was going to be,’ said a spokesperson, ‘we would have let it run for three months or more.’
Two years earlier, it would had been illegal for a real-life Othello and Desdemona to kiss in South Africa, never mind marry or have sex. Now Kani was kissing Joanna Weinberg every night, in full view of 500 people, in a script written by Shakespeare. Suzman and Kani got what they wanted. Othello hit a nerve.
Unlike a hundred other productions I had come across in my travels, this one I was actually able to watch. Suzman had persuaded a TV company to film Othello in the theatre and it had subsequently been transferred on to DVD. I had thrown the copy in my suitcase just before I left, with the dimmest recollection of having seen it as a student.
Returning from an evening at the Market where the only sign of the production had been a photograph of Kani and Weinberg in the bar, I watched it again. It was a revelation. Curled up in the room of my guesthouse, squinting at the tiny screen of my laptop through the soft fuzz of 1980s television haze, I felt as if I had rarely seen Othello so clearly.
It wasn’t perfect. The setting was stolidly conventional, Renaissance archways and flickering lanterns, and looked at
grave risk of toppling over. Some members of the cast were more secure than others. The jerkins could have done with a dry-clean.
But so much else seemed fresh-minted. Rarely had the opening scene, in which Richard Haines’s bullying Iago and Frantz Dobrowsky’s limp-as-lettuce Roderigo exchange insults about heathens, lascivious Moors, Barbary horses and the rest, felt so plainly shocking:
‘Swounds, sir, you’re robbed …
Your heart is burst, you have lost half your soul.
Even now, now, very now, an old black ram
Is tupping your white ewe.
Iago’s speech, rousing Desdemona’s father from his bed with the news that his daughter has eloped and married a man of another race, could have been transplanted with barely any updating to the dank bar-rooms populated by members of the South African National Front.
One person I recognised with a jolt: Emilia, Iago’s wife. It was Dorothy Ann Gould, whose work with homeless men I’d witnessed in Hillbrow; this must have been one of the first productions she did after returning from the UK. She was one of the finest Emilias I’d seen, full of sorrow and sharp outrage, especially at the end of the play, where she is the first good character to realise that Othello has been duped and that Desdemona is innocent (‘O gull, O dolt, | As ignorant as dirt!’). Having heard her talk about the problems of contemporary South Africa, I wondered if this was acting.
But Kani and Weinberg, as the hero and heroine, were at the centre of everything. Safely reunited in Cyprus after a wild sea voyage from Venice, they kissed each other with lingering passion – no doubts here that this was their wedding night, nor possible to forget that until recently they would not have been permitted to share it. Even the little things caught me: I had never before noticed how rarely Othello is addressed by his name, how often he is called just ‘the Moor’. The word made him sound like an alien species.
Worlds Elsewhere Page 42
