Gray Matter: Blow struck for diversity without diluting power?

Note has been duly taken. Michael Billington of the Guardian, sitting inscrutably beside me in the Stratford stalls on press night, went off to write a review which talked of history being made. Of the Game of Thrones star Lucian Msamati’s work on stage he added: “I had not anticipated how many fascinating ideas such an imaginative piece of casting would provoke.”

For the Daily Telegraph critic, Dominic Cavendish, “a blow [had been] struck for diversity without at all diluting the play’s perturbing power”. He added: “At a stroke we move beyond black-and-white ideas of racism as a motivator for Iago.”

But are these ideas actually there? In the public mind, perhaps, but the play itself delivers little of this sort beyond Iago’s support for the ravings of Desdemona’s rejected suitor Roderigo designed to turn her father Brabantio against the Moor. This is played as buffoonish comedy in the new production, thereby reducing its capacity to offend.

In a long essay on Othello in his Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, the doyen of Shakespearian critics Harold Bloom makes no mention of a racist theme in the play. The RSC Shakespeare: The Complete Works is silent on this matter too.

A study of the text shows that Iago’s insane malice is provoked by his having been passed over for promotion in favour of Michael Cassio and his suspicion that Othello might have cuckolded him.

In her Othello review in The Times, critic Sam Marlowe began with the surely unarguable contention that “The days of white performers blacking up to play the title role in Shakespeare’s tragedy are, thankfully, behind us.”

Reader D.R. Thorpe did argue, though, in a contribution to the newspaper’s letters column on June 15. Writing from a Banbury mysteriously relocated to “Bucks”, he said: “Should such sensibility be obligatory when one thinks of the great classical actors, especially in recent times – Alan Howard, Michael Pennington and John Shrapnel – who have been denied the opportunity of playing arguably the most challenging of all Shakespeare’s tragic roles, unlike John Gielgud, Laurence Olivier and Paul Scofield in an earlier age?”

In the next day’s letters column, the actor and writer Steven Berkoff continued the theme. Having referred to Olivier’s “spellbinding” Othello, he added: “I was lucky to be able to witness the event before the fiends of political correctness struck a no-go zone for white actors with this role.”

But ought it to be a no-go zone? While ‘blacking up’ can surely not be countenanced, it is entirely consistent with the principles of colour-blind casting that a white actor should play Othello without make-up.

Interestingly, the RSC’s latest Moor, Hugh Quarshie – a deeply thoughtful man who graduated in PPE from Christ Church, Oxford – once stated “Of all parts in the canon, perhaps Othello is the one which should most definitely not be played by a black actor”. His opinion has now clearly changed.

As I have observed here and elsewhere in the past, the company these days expects the audience also to be accent-deaf with the actors speaking in whatever local dialect they possess rather than giving us the plummy received pronunciation associated with performers of an older vintage.

It is interesting to note that the new Othello, directed by Iqbal Khan, features a Duke of Venice with an arm that ends, sans hand, at the elbow, with no effort made to disguise or hide this. The audience is presumably expected not to notice it, which in fact soon proves quite easy to do. That the actor in this case is also a woman, Nadia Albina, indicates how far audience blindness at the RSC is expected to extend.

It will need to soon, as well, at the Vaudeville Theatre in the West End, when David Suchet plays Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest.

“A man bag!”