Worlds Elsewhere (58 page)

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:

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:

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.

In some ways the critics were right: Kani's delivery was not immaculate in the cut-glass style of the RSC. There was a rawness to him, a timorousness. But to me that made sense. He looked like a man unsure of his footing, standing on ground that could slip away from under him at any moment. In the face of Iago's insinuations about Desdemona's unfaithfulness, the decorated general seemed to revert to a previous version of the world – one in which white men, not he, did the ordering around.

As often with
Othello,
it was Iago's show, but this Iago drew his power from the fact that he was a belligerent, bulging-eyed racist. Haines stuck his fingers in his nose in piggish imitation, rolled his eyes and grabbed his crotch, hee-hawing like an ass. There barely seemed a moment in which he wasn't in control: taller and broader than Othello, he butted against him, spoiling for a fight. Once he touched the hero's forehead, and with great deliberation wiped his hand afterwards to clean it. In company Haines affected something approaching an upper-class English accent. In soliloquy his voice was rougher, with the whip-crack vowels of Afrikaans lying just beneath, like a threat. ‘Cassio's a
proper
man,' he said in the mincing accent of an upper-class officer, before abruptly switching gear: ‘Let me see now | To
git heez plaice
.'

I had arrived in South Africa with doubts about whether
Othello
could work as agitprop: its perspective on race was surely too complicated for that, its constructions of ethnicity and identity too finely balanced. Earlier that summer, I had watched a production at the National
Theatre in London – smart and smartly contemporary, set in what was perhaps the modern-day British Army – where it had seemed almost irrelevant that Othello was black. In a world of colour-blind casting, performed in the heart of liberal, multicultural Britain, it was a study of jealousy gone disastrously wrong.

Here, unavoidably, the play was something sharper, more splintered and raw. Colour-blind casting was something no one could imagine in the South Africa of 1987.

What did it actually mean to play Othello? I was anxious to ask John Kani, but I wasn't having much luck. The Market, who were shortly to rename their main auditorium after Kani, couldn't locate him. His agent had been trying since before I arrived. He was rumoured to have five mobile phones; I had been ringing and texting one of them for three days straight, and hadn't yet been granted a reply.

As insurance, I thought it might be prudent to spend an afternoon finding out what other people had made of the Moor. For black performers,
Othello
has a tormented history, and not just in South Africa. I'd long been drawn to the life of the pioneering black American actor Ira Aldridge, by the time of his death in 1867 one of the most famous performers anywhere in the world. Denied the possibility of making a career in his homeland, the ‘African Roscius' (Roscius was a great Roman actor; Aldridge liked to encourage the rumour that he'd been born in Senegal rather than New York City) made a career in Britain and mainland Europe. Shakespeare was his passport. He excelled in many plays, notably as Shylock and Lear, but his signature role was Othello – described when Aldridge toured Russia as ‘voic[ing] the far-off groans of his own people, oppressed by unbelievable slavery'. Showered with honours by European heads of state, Aldridge proved that actors of colour could make Shakespeare their own.

The role was something similar for Paul Robeson, who identified closely with Aldridge and played the Moor several times, notably opposite Peggy Ashcroft at London's Savoy theatre in 1930. (The previous year, doing
Show Boat,
Robeson had been unable to get a table at the Savoy hotel next door.) In an era when it was still customary for white performers to smother their faces with black make-up – as they would continue to do in Britain and America until the early 1990s
– taking a plum part such as Othello was nothing less than an act of emancipation.

But in the years since, the play has once again become controversial. With the notable exception of Verdi's
Otello,
directors and audiences in most western countries now feel deeply queasy about the idea of casting a white performer in the lead. Given the grim legacy of minstrel shows and the like, ‘blacking up' is seen as unacceptable, and the fact that there are so few major classical roles for actors of colour makes it even harder to defend.