Guy Willoughby
review OFTHEWEEK
Othello does Maynardville, Maynardville does Othello … intriguing resonances are set up on this millennial cusp down at the fusty-touristy Cape, where the Bard’s most racially charged tragedy finally makes it on to the South African stage with, goodness, a black actor in the title role.
Shakespeare, global export and citizen more present, indeed omnipresent in the age of endless movie transfigurations of his plays has become a planetary commodity, a prism through which different locales continue to view themselves. Since 1994, Maynardville has duly given us a series of Kaapse variations in which directors and casts have fallen over themselves to ground, if not grind, a contemporary Shakespeare in our faces: Twelth Night at Agulhas, As You Like It in the yuppie gym, Romeo and Juliet on the Cape Flats and so on.
To director Keith Grenville’s credit, he steps outside this local-is-lekker lemming rush to revisit Othello in austere and traditional style. Most strikingly, the tragic hero is played by a black man (Hakeem Kae-Kazim, Nigerian-born and British-trained) while the rest of the cast are almost without exception blindingly, dazzlingly white. Grenville avowedly seeks to highlight an irony of the play the good man is black, the bad guys are white in an inversion of traditional European ethical imagery.
But, with Shakespeare, deeper ironies usually lurk. In 1604, Othello was played by a white man and the black-white semiotics we ponder over now were further skewed by Iago, villain of the piece, being played alternately by the same (white) actor who had rendered Othello. Race on the Jacobean stage was a more porous concept than we South Africans have (sadly) learned to understand it; and the Moors of renaissance Europe were as much part of the Arabic world as the African anyway.
These riders aside, Grenville’s Othello sets up and adroitly debates the politics of race and identity and it is perhaps only now that we can revisit these dynamics, free at last of the obvious and sordid dichotomies of apartheid and the struggle.
For in Shakespeare’s Venice, the black Othello is embraced by the white power establishment as insider, necessary military protector, the Colin Powell of his day provided he mysteriously “knows his place”. This is much less like the crude prejudice of the old South Africa and much more the situation of the silkily “multicultural” First World, where inclusivity is fine as long as it rocks no economo-political boats.
The drama of Othello, most domestic of Shakespeare’s tragedies, turns on the tripartite relationship of the valiant title-hero, his false friend and ensign Iago, and Othello’s wife, the beautiful (and here, very blonde) Desdemona (Tessa Jubber), victim of the other two.
Here, Kae-Kazim and Gavin van den Berg are worthy, compelling, complex foils: the latter, in dark satanic black another semiotic irony? in particular a masterpiece of well-observed cunning. For Iago steadily plays upon Othello’s deep-seated cultural unease and isolation, the black general’s suspicion throughout that he is never fully accepted by the Venetian establishment that fawns on him when he is needed.
Kae-Kazim’s Othello has sex, presence and stature and he moves with initial catlike instinct and assurance through the overdecorated surfaces of the Venetian state. His slow, inexorable descent into a kind of fitful, enervating paranoia, as the pivots of identity are removed by his sworn enemy, is nicely judged.
In the final breakneck scenes that rush to his murder of the supposedly false Desdemona and his subsequent anguish and remorse, there are gradations of emotion missing: more sigh and less bellow would have done the job as well. But these are small disquiets in a powerful and always arresting performance.
Tessa Jubber’s Desdemona begins in rather pat gestures but deepens in tragic dimension, but it is Anthea Thompson’s Emilia wife to Iago, unwitting and ultimately horrified helpmate in the latter’s plotting who engrosses with the shifting textures of her performance.
Most other performances from a cast widely varying in age and experience are efficient rather than inspired, but especial mention must be made of Alan Coate’s authorative Venetian worthy Lodovico and Paul du Toit as Othello’s ardent, hapless lieutenant, the other pivot of Iago’s betrayal.
Keith Grenville has tried to bridge the roomy Maynardville gap between audience and players by closing the playing space and thrusting it daringly forward, but unfortunately this attempt to embrace small-screen values skews sight-lines, and this reviewer spent many of the closing moments of boudoir drama perched shakily on the back of his seat.
This niggling objection aside, Othello 2001 makes a worthy fight for cultural space in Cape Town, presenting a dramatic meditation on the intimate nexus of race, identity and sexuality that 16th-century manners aside insists on contemporary relevance. Button up tight, take a thermos and enjoy.
Othello is on at Maynardville, Wynberg, until February 24. For more information Tel: (021) 421?7695