For no particular reason that I can fathom, the Dirty Duck on the Waterside in Stratford-upon-Avon is shut tight at this crucial time of the year.
It might just seem like any wet and windy February to some — time to take stock of life at the midpoint of Tony Blair’s winter of discontent and withdrawing into your shell.
The trouble is, February is high season for tourists and punters who consider themselves Shakespeare fundis here in the middle of the Bard’s home town. And the Dirty Duck (which should more properly be referred to by its official name, the Black Swan) is a major draw for all concerned for almost 20 hours of the day during the Royal Shakespeare Company’s seasonal residence at Stratford.
I was really quite looking forward to propping up the old wooden bar at the Duck, checking to see if my name was still carved into it in the scrawl of the penknife I used to carry around in my wasted youth.
But nothing will ever be the same again. The Duck is being renovated; the bar is being stripped and replaced, I assume, with a smart, semi-vinyl monstrosity in keeping with the modern, post-Iraq war age. The wooden floors that were varnished with the blood, sweat and vomit of generations of Shakspearean actors are in the process of being sanded down with high-powered, robot-like machines. All trace of the past, including my part in it, is being systematically eliminated.
It is a mighty shame that this is all happening now, when my dear friend and colleague, Sello Maake kaNcube, is about to strut the Stratford boards for the first time, in the tricky role of Othello. If I have come all this way to lend kaNcube, the former enfant terrible of struggle theatre, moral support at this high point of an unexpected mid-life classical career, I at least deserve to be able to find sustenance at the scene of old, long-forgiven crimes.
But as my great-grandfather used to say, you just can’t trust the English. They say one thing and do another.
So the Dirty Duck is closed. Solace must be sought elsewhere, in this quaint, provincial, Olde English town that is looking increasingly Japanese, judging by the waves of sightseers training their binoculars carelessly into the windows of long-suffering British yeomen and yeowomen.
I am jetlagged, but sit in the Swan Theatre transfixed by what kaNcube has achieved.
I know this scene of old. I too was a lonely black actor buried deep in the bosom of the Royal Shakespeare Company once upon a time, many years ago. I too have experienced those banks of staring, non-committal blue and green eyes looming out of the gloom of the auditorium, waiting to see you stumble, mumble, slip up on that fantastic iambic pentameter.
‘I thought both black boys were very good,” said one elderly lady after I had played two parts in another Shakespeare play some 25 years earlier. She hadn’t realised, or even conceived, that it could have been the same actor.
You are a black boy surrounded by a white cast. Every moment is a challenge. For kaNcube in particular, the challenge was to hold his own, ride a bucking charger of a role in the midst of a white cast that had mostly had a classical training in England, and a bank of experience in the classical cannon since then.
On top of that, it is also Shakespeare’s most racially charged play — about a black man isolated in a white society, and finally destroyed by it. (And on top of that, he has to contend with Sir Anthony Sher’s Iago — but later for that.)
KaNcube is a handsome boy from Atteridgeville, who later grew up in Soweto. He trained in the township school of quick wits and hard knocks. He never went further than matric. He launched himself into acting in Gibson Kente’s theatre company and just went on from there.
He is best known in South Africa for playing the role of ‘Archie” in the appalling television soapie Generations, and then had to flee the country to save his own sanity.
Since then he has appeared as the main lion in The Lion King in the West End of London — and now as Othello at Stratford-upon-Avon.
It is hard to describe just how extraordinary his performance in this role really is — and just how far, and how confidently, the strapping lad from Atteridgeville has come.
Othello is one of Shakespeare’s most controversial plays — at least it has become so in the modern age, when issues of race are so charged with accusation and counter-accusation. Is Othello about racism, or simply about human folly? How does the leading actor, the Man-Who-Plays-the-Moor, balance this conundrum?
For years it was assumed that the role of Othello was a vehicle for a white actor to put on blackface and mime the antics of a deranged Negro who ends up killing his white wife in a fit of jealousy.
What kaNcube does, against all the odds stacked against him, both in life and in the play, is redeem Othello’s humanity — a feat, as one long-time observer of the Stratford scene said to me, that has probably never been achieved before.
The British press have been generally sniffy about his performance — mostly because they insist on constantly cross-referencing to Laurence Olivier’s notorious rendition of the role at the Old Vic in 1954 or thereabouts — which many critics insist is the definitive way of depicting the Moor of Venice.
Maybe so, maybe no.
KaNcube grabs the story and all its nuances by the throat, nakedly bringing his personal understandings of the vagaries of life and love to the fore, and turns in a performance of such subtle power, sensitivity and passion that it leaves the audience breathless. He is Othello.
No mean feat on the Stratford stage.
And no mean feat that, a day after he made his first appearance, they opened the Dirty Duck again.
My odyssey had not been for nothing.