Andrew Dickson explores how different actors have struggled with the character of Othello and the play's depiction of race.
‘Of all the parts in the canon, perhaps Othello is the one which should most definitely not be played by a black actor,’ wrote the British-Ghanaian actor Hugh Quarshie in a lecture published in 1998. Doing so risked legitimising – in fact condoning – the racist stereotype of a black man who loses his wits, then resorts to killing his white wife in a fit of crazed jealousy, Quarshie argued.
Seventeen years later, Quarshie – who cut his teeth at the Royal Shakespeare Company in the 1980s and 90s in a number of high-profile roles – has played the Moor of Venice in the RSC’s new production of Othello. When we talk after a long day of rehearsals, he is at pains to point out that things are more complex than his earlier argument suggests. He wasn’t saying that no black performer should ever play Othello; rather, that black performers should think long and hard about doing battle not just with the play, but the context from which it springs. ‘Only by black actors playing the role,’ he says, ‘can we address some of the racist traditions and assumptions that the play is based on’.
Quarshie was joined on stage by Lucian Msamati, who will make theatrical history as the first black actor to play Iago at the RSC, and one of only a handful worldwide. The casting of the British-Tanzanian actor has thrown up tantalising questions about the dynamics of this most complex and controversial of plays. Does it matter that Msamati’s Iago is black? Can he be that, and also an out-and-out racist? Is the play itself even about race?
For much of its history, Othello has provided nourishing fodder for racists: from the queasy arguments of Samuel Taylor Coleridge that it would be ‘something monstrous’ to conceive of Desdemona ‘falling in love with a veritable negro’, to the grim parodies that circulated in 19th-century South Africa.
To read the full article from the British Library, click HERE.
