Othello Cest Qui

Smock Alley Theatre

FOUR HUNDRED years since Shakespeare’s Othello was first performed, there is still one vexed question worth asking: Is it a racist work? The most sober answer is the most nuanced: this tale of a noble Moorish soldier, who marries a white woman and is manipulated by his treacherous ensign Iago into a jealous, murderous rage, is a depiction of how racism is normalised and internalised: a clear-sighted tragedy, generations ahead of its time.

That, however, is not always the way it has been interpreted. Centuries of prejudice consciously or unconsciously see Othello’s flaw – hot-headed and easily duped – entwined with his ethnicity. Throw in a legacy of blackface performances and you have some idea of the hand-wringing problems of this Caucasian contrivance: it’s not all black and white.

This is where we find Gintersdorfer/Klassen, the Hamburg theatre makers whose co-production with Kampnagel has Frank Edmond Yao, a black actor from the Ivory Coast, asking an innocent question of his German co-star, Cornelia Dorr: "Othello c'est qui?" To honour and transcend the tensions of the play, the answer of this unadorned production must notbe, "Othello, c'est lui".

For all the clever interpolations of the play’s themes in the butter-wouldn’t-melt naivety of director Monika Gintersdorfer’s production, any attempt to interpret Othello along cultural lines is to enter a political minefield. This show chooses to dance through it.

With liberal reference to a ballet production, whose choreography seems to exoticise Othello even more than Shakespeare, Gintersdorfer applies various layers of cooling ironies (not least of which is Knut Klassen’s design credit for an entirely bare stage; perhaps the most admirably audacious acknowledgement since John Cage’s 4’33”.

Dorr comes off as both stereotypically narcissistic (it’s worth it to be an actress, she tells us, when you delight a sold-out house) and gently insightful about the conceit of reality theatre: “I don’t think you can really see me.”

In an artful twist, she translates Yao’s French for us throughout: even disabusing us of preconceptions around African culture, dance or sexuality, he never completely speaks for himself.

Where they come completely unstuck, however, and where irony deserts them, is when Yao announces “C’est n’est plus moi” (“It’s not me any more”).

Not, sadly, because he is trapped in a construct, but because he describes an enraging situation of perceived betrayal and its most dreadful consequence.

“This is to tell you who is Othello,” Yao concludes earnestly, and, I’m afraid, fatally. Linking so-called “honour killings” to the leaky prejudices of play’s dramatic conceit is a very dangerous game. Iago, and everything he stands for, slips away undetected.

Endstoday.