Worlds Elsewhere (59 page)

But then some black performers have problems with Othello, too. James Earl Jones has expressed his unease, despite doing the play on Broadway in 1982 to huge success. The British-Ghanaian actor Hugh Quarshie has declared that ‘Othello is the one [role] which should most definitely not be played by a black actor'. (Long after I was in South Africa it was announced Quarshie would play the part at the RSC, opposite Lucian Msamati, who is of Tanzanian heritage, as Iago.)

Many of these debates hinge upon Shakespeare's conception of the role. It is generally agreed that he created three characters who can be described as ‘black': the villainous Aaron the Moor in
Titus Andronicus,
the blundering Prince of Morocco in
The Merchant of Venice
and, of course, the Moor of Venice himself. Others make their way on stage, or drift tantalisingly close: Aaron's child with Queen Tamora in
Titus Andronicus,
described as a ‘tawny slave', so presumably mixed-race; the nameless ‘Negro' girl made pregnant by Lancelot Gobbo in
The Merchant of Venice;
the ‘King of Tunis' who marries the daughter of the King of Naples just before the action of
The Tempest.
But other figures are more elusive. How should the ethnicity of the Egyptian Cleopatra, who describes her skin as ‘with Phoebus' amorous pinches black', be played? Or Caliban? And what the playwright intended by making characters African' – if the intention is consistent – is an even larger question. In the era of postcolonial criticism, few questions have used up so many gallons of scholarly ink.

There is much to disagree on. For a start, ‘blackness' – the scare quotes seem necessary – was a complex and unstable notion for Shakespeare and his contemporaries. For much of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries the number of people in England who were non-white was minuscule, even in the multicultural metropolis of London. Although Elizabethan privateers were only too pleased to ship African slaves to America and the Caribbean, England itself
had no regulated slave trade, unlike other European countries such as Portugal or Spain.

A small number of black Africans – mainly West Africans, along with Berbers from northern Africa – had been brought to England, where they were overwhelmingly employed in domestic work. Queen Elizabeth I had a black maidservant, as did high-profile members of her court. Some seem to have found employment as entertainers: one ‘John Blanke, the blacke trumpeter', played regularly for Henry VII and Henry VIII, while James I employed black entertainers.

Even so, the line of tolerance was thin. Despite there being so very few black people resident – perhaps a thousand in total, half of one per cent of London's population – official anxiety increased sharply in the late sixteenth century, particularly in the recession-struck 1590s. Queen Elizabeth may have been content to be served by people of colour, but she issued numerous edicts ordering the expulsion of a group of black men captured from a Spanish colony in the West Indies, proclaiming in 1596 that ‘there are of late divers blackmoores brought into this realm, of which kind of people there are allready here to manie' and that it was her ‘good pleasure to have those kinde of people sent out of the lande'. The queen repeated the call in 1601, complaining about the ‘great numbers of Negars and Blackamoors'. Declaring them ‘infidels, having no understanding of Christ or his gospel', she again called for them to be thrown out. (It seems unlikely any actually were.)

It was a contradiction. On the one hand, as England came increasingly into contact with the non-white world, people of African heritage gained work as servants and performers, and on occasion were treated with exaggerated respect, as when the Moroccan ambassador, whose portrait I had seen at the British Museum, visited Elizabeth's court in 1600 to negotiate trade and diplomatic relations. On the other, they were regarded as brutish heathen, relegated by the colour of their skin – and suspicions about their faith, even if they had converted to Christianity – to the condition of exotic and alien other.

On to this complex and contradictory jumble of ideas about ethnicity, class and religion all manner of stereotypes and suspicions were projected. ‘Blackamoors' had been commonplace in European literature since the medieval period, and one theory holds that English Morris dancing has its origins in the impersonation of
moriscos
or Moors. White performers blacked up to play devils and damned souls in miracle and mystery plays. At the court of James I, it was briefly
fashionable to slum it in blackface: in Ben Jonson's
Masque of Blackness
(1605), a troupe of high-born ladies donned dark make-up in order to play ‘Africans'. (Jonson may have borrowed the idea from
Othello,
written a year or two earlier.)

On the infrequent occasions black characters appear in Elizabethan drama, they are cast in the role of calculating villain, as in George Peele's
The Battle of Alcazar
(
c.
1588–89), a history play dominated by the machiavellian schemings of the Moorish Muly Mahamet, and Thomas Dekker's co-written
Lust's Dominion
(1598–99), in which a Barbary prince, Eleazar, manoeuvres to the summit of the Spanish aristocracy. Black performers were unknown on the public stage, so both characters were almost certainly played by white actors wearing make-up.

Aaron in
Titus Andronicus
is squarely in this tradition. A snarling villain who plots Titus's downfall while simultaneously conducting an affair with Queen Tamora, he represents the forces of devilish ambition, gleefully comparing himself to a ‘black dog'. But even Aaron contains complexities – not only do his intelligence and wit make him the most compelling character on stage, but his apparently loving relationship with Tamora is a rebuke to Jacobethan stereotypes about black men's unrestrained sexuality. His desperation to save their child from death is one of the most humane aspects of a notoriously inhumane play.

Yet it was in
Othello
that Shakespeare forced his audiences to re-examine their deepest prejudices. At one level, as Quarshie argued, the play enacts a crude racist fantasy: a black man marries a nice white girl and murders her in a fit of sexual jealousy. But up close
Othello
makes those interpretations impossible to sustain. The Moor is highly valued by the white Venetian senate, and his relationship with Desdemona is a consensual love match. He is also, of course, the hero for whom the play is named, the unwitting victim of events rather than their scheming author.

Though the text is saturated with imagery of white and black, light and dark, good and evil, Shakespeare renders those categories all but meaningless. Iago and Roderigo might slander Othello as a ‘thick-lips' and an ‘old black ram', but the hero is described by the Duke of Venice as ‘far more fair than black'. Othello himself later frets that Desdemona is a ‘fair paper' who has been blackened by adultery, and it is Iago, a white man, who exults that he will ‘turn her virtue into pitch' and compares himself to a devil who indulges in ‘the blackest sins'.

It is all but certain that Shakespeare created the role for his long-term collaborator, the actor Richard Burbage. What did the audience who watched the play at James I's court in November 1604 see? How did they interpret Burbage blacking up to play a ‘Moor' who has at some point been ‘sold to slavery', then converted to Christianity, and is now a general in the Venetian army on assignment in Cyprus, fighting the Muslim Turks? It was surely impossible to say, other than that all their expectations were confounded.

The critic Jonathan Dollimore puts the paradox: ‘Does the fate of Othello confirm, qualify, or discount the charge that this play is racist? Certainly the play enacts a series of displacements of the aberrant and the abhorrent on to the alien. But is it endorsing that process, or representing it for our attention?' That, surely, is the question.

On my penultimate evening in Johannesburg, my phone buzzed. John Kani. The text offered the curtest of apologies. I still wanted to meet? Tomorrow? Could I get to the new shopping mall at Rosebank?

Rolling into the restaurant an hour late, wearing a blue blazer, matching trousers and a baseball cap, the great man briefly acknowledged my presence, then turned away to sign autographs. I wondered if the cap was intended to hide his identity, or advertise it. As a leggy, gym-toned woman went into a pantomime of cardiac arrest, I suspected it was the latter.

He looked very little like the uncertain figure I'd seen on screen. Now seventy, equipped with half-moon glasses, a neat salt-and-pepper goatee and an indulgent, slow-burning smile, Kani had grown into the role of elder statesman with ease. He was a dead ringer for former president Thabo Mbeki: indeed, the pair were old friends from the resistance days. Mbeki would have been easier to get hold of, I thought.

‘Sorry,' he said eventually, flashing a pearlescent film-star grin and offering the lightest of shrugs. This is just how it was when you were John Kani.

We began at the beginning. Born in 1942 into an isiXhosa-speaking family in New Brighton just outside Port Elizabeth, along the coast from Cape Town, he was one of eleven children. At school he'd worked hard and was lucky – the Bantu Education Act hadn't fully come into force, and his class were exposed to the Eng Lit-heavy curriculum of
the former Cape Colony: Chaucer, Milton, Wordsworth, T. S. Eliot, Shakespeare.

Kani had little regard for the works of Shakespeare (‘we didn't know who he was') until one day when he was fifteen, when his isiXhosa teacher brought into class a translation of
Julius Caesar.
Kani was asked to stand up and read Mark Antony's speech addressed to the dead Caesar, ‘O pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth'. Declaiming the words in his own language, he sensed how powerful it felt to be an actor. He joined the drama society and began to dream of a life on stage.

Though his eldest brother's arrest for involvement in the ANC meant that he was forced to take a job at Port Elizabeth's Ford car plant, Kani became involved with an amateur group called the Serpent Players, run by Athol Fugard, then just beginning to make a name for himself as a playwright.

Their early work together, much of it created with Kani's former schoolmate Winston Ntshona, was almost exclusively political – Brechtian, minimalist, often improvised, usually performed to township audiences. Their biggest success together was
Sizwe Banzi is Dead
in 1972, set in Port Elizabeth. Kani played a photographer who encounters a businessman who's stolen a dead man's identity in order to beat the passbook system. Premiered in Cape Town, it transferred to London's Royal Court, then to the West End, then on to Broadway. Soon afterwards Kani moved to Soweto and became involved in the Market.

There was little practical difference between making consciousness-raising drama and taking part in the struggle, he explained. The security services took an obsessive interest in their activities; once, during a curtain call, Kani was seized by police and spent twenty-three days in jail. An uncle did time on Robben Island. His younger brother Xolile was later shot dead while participating in a protest.

But Kani didn't want to be stereotyped as an actor-activist. With Ntshona, he did
Waiting for Godot,
set in a thinly veiled version of their homeland. They were directed by the same man who had written
Othello Slegs Blankes,
Donald Howarth. In 1985, with the Immorality Act still on the statute books, Kani agreed to take the role of the valet Jean in August Strindberg's
Miss Julie,
who has a destructive affair with the mistress of the house, played by the white actor Sandra Prinsloo. One night half the audience walked out in orchestrated protest. Later in the run, Kani was set upon by a gang, and left with eleven stab wounds.

Suzman had contacted him about
Othello
not long afterwards. ‘I said, “Janet, I've just come through a terrible time. I did
Miss Julie,
it got me eleven stab wounds. I don't think white people will like this.” And she said, “Then why are you doing theatre? We do theatre to empower people, we do theatre to present our case.” I thought – OK, on condition that the entire cast is white, only Othello is black, and that we stick to the text.' He sipped on his green tea. ‘So we started the process.'

Was it a role he'd ever considered? Did he know its history?

‘I remember when I was a kid seeing
Othello
in Port Elizabeth. There was this white actor, wearing black make-up, who had on this old black hat and he was called a “Moor”. Our teacher explained to us, we mustn't confuse the Moor with a black African. It is a shade within dark, perhaps lesser white, but still white – nothing to do with race.' He looked ironic. ‘That is what my teacher said.'

Not having studied Shakespeare since school, he ended up putting much of the text into isiXhosa in order to learn it. ‘I was translating mentally as I spoke. Janet looked at me and said, “God, they are going to kill you in England; they are going to kill you.” I said, “That's a chance we're going to have to take.'”

The critics were the least of their problems. After he was arrested yet again on the way in from Soweto, what followed was one of the most fantastical experiences of his life: a seminar in Shakespearian close reading from the Special Branch of the South African police force.

Kani reenacted the scene before my eyes, voices and all. ‘They pull out a script! They go to page seven, where it says, “Othello takes Desdemona into his arms.'” He shifted into a brute Afrikaans accent.
‘“You kissed her on her lips for seven-and-a-half seconds! It's not in the script!”
Page twenty-four, when they arrive in Cyprus,
“You embraced her and you kissed her all over her face and you touched her breast!”'
He was laughing hard, chest rocking. ‘Like this, for hours.'