Review of Shakespeare’sOthello(Directed by Iqbal Khan for the Royal Shakespeare Company) at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, June 2015. Shown as Part of “Culture in Quarantine” on BBC IPlayer, 23 April to 22 August 2020.

Race is by no means the only theme in Shakespeare’s Othello: The Moor of Venice. Jealousy conspicuously underpins the actions not only of the title character, but also those of Iago, Roderigo, and Bianca. Patriarchal power, sexuality, and the concept of evil have furnished fertile ground for rich discussions of the play’s other motifs. Nevertheless, the conversation around Othello and its production history invariably returns to its treatments of Black identity and Black stereotypes. Iqbal Khan’s 2015 production for the Royal Shakespeare Company constituted a welcome complication of the historical discussion of race’s place in the play. In this staging, for the first time in the RSC’s history, Black actors (Hugh Quarshie and Lucian Msamati, respectively) played both Othello and Iago. Led by powerfully sophisticated and innovative performances from these two stars, Khan’s Othello succeeded in upending many racialised preconceptions of symbolism and emotion rooted in the play’s discursive tradition. From Ira Aldridge and Paul Robeson onward, Othello was the singular Shakespearean role in which Black actors were permitted to excel for much of the twentieth century. Such pigeonholing has led more recent actors – including, notably, Quarshie himself in a 1998 lecture – to conclude that, for a Black man, playing the part constituted an immoral act. The play’s white author, Quarshie argued, “did not explode but exploit the convention of the barbarous Moor for his dramatic ends” (18). Even over the last several decades, as it has almost exclusively been played by Black actors, the character of Othello has served as a cipher for a white audience’s idea of Otherness. The longstanding notion of his descent from an actively civilized “noble Moor”, through racialised gullibility, into the truly dark depths of barbarous savageness exemplifies this problem. This stereotyping stems, in Michael Rogin’s words,