Othello’s ‘travels’ history’ illuminated anew: Beyond black and white in Iqbal Khan’s RSC revival (2015)

Beyond black and white

The unanswered questions of Othello criticism and of the play – its characters and actors, on the page and on stage and screen – can be queried by invoking an alternative to Joseph Jastrow’s classic double view of the rabbit/duck from Gestalt psychology: the double-focus of black zebra with white stripes/white zebra with black stripes. ¹ Both applications are based on a figure-ground perception, whereby the image fluctuates between the two possibilities even though that on the retina remains constant, making it virtually impossible to see both images at once. For the twentieth-century optical art artist Victor Vasarely (1906–97), the zebra was the optimal figure to convey optical illusion; he produced a succession of somewhat abstract works in which alternating, curved black and white lines gave the illusion of a three-dimensional zebra: white on black or black on white? The application is pushed further with the notion of a ‘zebra crossing’ (a pedestrian crosswalk signalled by broad black and white stripes on the road) and to its extreme limit with the idea of a ‘zebra in a zebra crossing’. ²

The point is that Othello ‘is itself the most elusive and maddening of optical – and conceptual – illusions, figure and ground constantly exchanging places’ ³ ; as Shakespeare tells us from the start, ‘tis a pageant / To keep us in false gaze’ (1.3.19–20). The play’s conceptual and perceptual problems are posited in these non-black-and-white terms:

The first kind of reading – Othello as a black zebra with white stripes – would view the play as about the referent, blackness, as the underlying ‘reality’ toward which critical attention should turn. The second kind of reading – Othello as a white zebra with black stripes – would point instead toward the question of representation, of blackness as a theatrical (and political and cultural) effect, and thus as a template and touchstone for response on and off stage. ⁴

A doubleness of focus implicit in the Gestalt shifting between figure and ground – should the play be thought of as centred on Othello or on Iago (‘Black zebra with white stripes? Or white zebra with black stripes?’) ⁵ – was pushed beyond its wonted performative limits when two consummate black actors took on those roles in Iqbal Khan’s 2015 revival with the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC): the British-Ghanaian actor Hugh Quarshie played the eponymous hero and the British-Tanzanian/Zimbabwean actor Lucian Msamati made theatre history as the RSC’s first black actor in the role of the ensign. Casting a black actor as Iago is not exactly new: ‘[I]t’s been done by at least one director who wanted to make the point that racism is not just a black/white issue and can manifest itself in all kinds of subtle and insidious ways’. ⁶ Nevertheless, that Quarshie and Msamati performed in a multicultural and racially diverse world increased the available data or ground from which figures could emerge to arrest our spectating gaze and so expand received notions of what the play is ‘about’. It is not surprising, though, that the question of whether Othello is a play ‘about race’ is often the first to surface. ⁷ But Ayanna Thompson aptly broadens the issue, querying what the play can also be ‘about’:

Or maybe it is a play about religion and ethnicity? Or maybe it is a play about jealousy in general? Perhaps it is really a domestic tragedy framed within a military narrative? Or is it the exact opposite: a military tragedy framed in a domestic drama? Or possibly it is simply an experiment in transforming a comedy into a tragedy? Or maybe Othello is about the nature of evil? Or the nature of man? Or the nature of woman? Or the nature of the family? Or the changing nature of the family in an increasingly global world? ⁸

(Re)reading Iqbal Khan’s Othello: An ensemble approach

As the play opened, two men got into a boat secured on a grate over which water rose: Iago and Roderigo (James Corrigan) were situated on the Venetian canals, which constituted the first of three aquatic motifs in the staging, this one showcasing ‘business and commerce’. Ciaran Bagnall’s set was meant to be a version of ‘now’ but not ‘real,’ and though it had a resonance of the modern, it was more flexible and reflected the ‘poetic’ potential of design.

The issue of race was not meant to be foregrounded in the production’s contemporary-world conception. With regard to the mythology that Othello is ‘a racist play’, Msamati opined that it is ‘so much more than that’, however much those issues should not be ‘trivialised’ or ‘glossed over’. Ultimately ‘what drives Iago’, he adds, ‘is not anything racial at all but something much deeper, much more dangerous, and much more emotional’. ⁹ Nevertheless, race lingered beneath the surface, albeit with an internalized twist. Iago vehemently decried his sense of injustice at being passed over for promotion and listened indulgently to the prattle of Roderigo, until the latter spouted the reference to Othello as the ‘thicklips’ (1.1.65). The ensign, distinctly the outsider, froze, stared down, pulled a cigarette from his lips and laughed in the face of the whiny Venetian gentleman as he sent him sprawling from the boat to call up Brabantio. Initially, this was a pivotal moment in determining whether a black Iago would change the dynamics of the play; the conclusion was that the black man could exploit the nervousness of the white man around the language of race. ¹⁰ That Iago was able, moreover, to release the tension building up in the audience gave him enormous power. If racism was operating from outside the ethnic group with Roderigo’s remark about ‘thicklips’, it also was operating from within with Msamati’s Iago bantering to Brabantio about ‘an old black ram…tupping [his] white ewe’ (1.1.87–8) and his saying that the senator would have his daughter ‘covered with a Barbary horse’ (1.1.110). If the director thought that a black man’s use of such language was ‘liberating’, might we also speak – however anachronistically – of a brand of ‘internalized racism’ that can generate patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving that result in criticizing, invalidating and hating oneself vis-à-vis the dominant (white) culture? ¹¹ These issues sprang from the 2015 mindset of the production, as voiced by Joanna Vanderham’s Desdemona: ‘We were not particularly deferential to Shakespeare – not putting him on a pedestal, and that allowed us the freedom to embrace the modern world we set it in’; and by Quarshie: ‘There is no point putting on a Shakespeare play unless it speaks to a modern audience’.

So, who was Quarshie’s Othello in Khan’s production? Moving beyond issues of black, white and blackface, Quarshie construed his Othello as a man who ‘does not have to try and fit into Venetian tastes and culture’; he is ‘settled in his identity, and the relationship with Desdemona has completed him. The break-up of that relationship is what unsettles him to the point of destroying him: his sense of belonging and his sense of his own worth’. And side-stepping the loaded question of the ‘universality’ of Shakespeare’s plays, Quarshie averred rather that his stories are universal, ‘concerned as they are with love loss and identity’. ¹² His first appearance rather flew in the face of conventional critical interpretation, largely due to the wit and style of the actor who played against poetic or romantic notions of the character. Othello came across, not as the ‘extravagant and wheeling stranger’ (1.1.134) that Roderigo called him, nor as just a soldier and a man of action (as opposed to a Venetian statesmen like Brabantio), nor as antithetical to the refined and courtly Florentine that Cassio was purported to be, but as a ‘real’ man stylishly attired in shirt and waistcoat, celebrating his wedding with a glass of champagne in a relaxed and easy mode. He responded to Iago’s question, ‘Are you fast married?’ (1.2.11), by swaying his hips in unison with the rapid strums of an onstage guitarist. The idea was for the audience to see that the general was a man with thoughts, feelings and emotions; if rather complaisant initially, he was supremely confident of his abilities. There was little sense of ‘a man who doubts his social, though not his martial, abilities’. ¹³ As Cassio (Jacob Fortune-Lloyd) informed Othello that the Duke required his ‘haste-post-haste appearance’ (1.2.37) at a military council, the intimacy between the general and his lieutenant was apparent. That situation created some tension between Cassio and Iago (by then the efficient ensign rather than the rough, betrayed lover and outsider of the first scene) over who, in the director’s view, knew more, who had ‘ownership’ of Othello.

The ensuing confrontation between Brabantio’s armed officers and Othello’s mercenary guards underscored the different understandings of martial skills and the language of violence. The general was not out of control as he pacified the fighters (‘Keep up your bright swords, for the dew will rust them’ [1.2.59]) and showed an authoritative side of his character. The fact that the costume designer (Fotini Dimou) paralleled the look of Othello and Brabantio (Brian Protheroe), attiring both in plum-coloured velvet jackets that were modern yet ‘iconic’ (in that they could still feel modern 20 years later), linked the two men psychologically: if the senator could feel betrayed by Desdemona and change his earlier welcoming attitude towards the general so radically once he had turned son-in-law, Othello could modify his stance towards his wife very rapidly once he felt himself betrayed by her. Perhaps, Brabantio’s later premonition, ‘She has deceived her father, and may thee’ (1.3.294) had never been so graphically (if falsely) connected to the two.

The late night council meeting (1.3) was set in a secretive, private chamber in the Doge’s palace designated the Hall of the Council of Ten (Consiglio dei Dieci), which existed from 1310 to 1797 as one of the main governing bodies of the Republic of Venice. A steel table for the military business at hand arose out of the waterway of the first scene; water was always in the surrounds. According to the director, the female actor (Nadia Albina) cast as the Duke had the benefit of different registers at her disposal: She was able to play both ‘masculine’ qualities, wielding great authority with aplomb, and ‘feminine’ qualities, showing herself persuasive as when for example she sought to ‘help [the] lovers / into [Brabantio’s] favor’ (1.3.201–2). The production’s superb Brabantio skilfully engaged the audience in his mocking of Othello, using humour to demean him as much as possible, but underneath the diatribe one could discern a father’s broken heart. Quarshie, wary of privileging the tradition of romance and epic and the sonorous quality of ‘the Othello music’, ¹⁴ foregrounded the general’s wit and strategic deployment of ideas. Othello looked intensely at Brabantio initially on ‘Her father loved me, oft invited me’ (1.3.129), and again on ‘She loved me for the dangers I had passed / And I loved her that she did pity them’, and intensified his tone on ‘This only is the witchcraft I have used’ (1.3.168–70).

If the armchair (‘dramatic’ as opposed to ‘theatrical’) Othello is often taken to be conscripted and confined rather than freed by love (1.2.26–7), or frequently perceived to love Desdemona because she esteemed and loved him for what he did, or repeatedly thought ‘to [fall] in love with her love for him, her mirroring of his legendary career’, ¹⁵ to what extent did this production’s Othello seem apt to ‘confuse the personal with the public’? ¹⁶ Vanderham’s platinum blonde Desdemona was from the first, as many critics noted, ‘tough, independent and sexy’; ‘exceptionally assured’; ‘an imposing free-thinking figure’. ¹⁷ It was evident that she desired her husband as much as she loved him and that he loved his wife. When the Duke suggested that Desdemona remain ‘at her father’s’ (1.3.240) while her husband fought against the Ottomites, Brabantio’s ‘I’ll not have it so’, followed by Othello’s ‘Nor I’, was similarly negated by Desdemona’s rapidly fired ‘Nor I’ (a slight shift of emphasis from the text’s ‘Nor would I there reside’) (1.3.241–2); Othello welcomed Desdemona’s forthrightness and assumption of agency. Vanderham’s backstory focused on the ‘complete trust and belief’ the couple had for one another based on a mutual ‘gut instinct’ around the person with whom they want to spend the rest of their lives, though that love and trust would be ‘tested to breaking point’.

If Othello wanted to protect his wife, she would not be so indulged, and the Duke herself did not display sympathy as woman qua woman but played the hard political realities: This private issue had to be resolved so that the council could get on with pressing public matters. It could not simply be assumed that his reasons for wanting her to accompany him to Cyprus were not erotic: Othello moved towards Desdemona and embraced her as he urged that she ‘have [her] voice’ though ‘not / To please the palate of [his] appetite’ (1.3.261–3). In performance, it was not categorically about eschewal of a carnal need, ‘a denial of appetite and personal desire, a denial of the private man’ ¹⁸ – not only because gestures spoke as loudly as words, but also because the rest of the speech (1.3.264–72) was omitted except for the line, ‘But to be free and bounteous to her mind’ (1.3.266). The issue of his being too old and restrained to be driven by young sexual passion was thus attenuated; Othello read as a man in love and not just as a hero capable of defending Venice. He showed virtually no (self-)doubt as he delivered Desdemona over to Iago for safe passage to Cyprus and pronounced the loaded line, ‘My life upon her faith’ (1.3.295). That the latter thought would come back and haunt him was made explicit when a hardly motiveless Iago, in a plot-engendering and audience-entrapping soliloquy, devised a plan blow-by-blow, for his ‘sport and profit’ and hatred of the Moor, to ‘abuse Othello’s ear’ that Cassio was ‘too familiar’ with Desdemona (1.3.385, 394, 395). The actor’s ability to sound natural and spontaneous, all the while that he engaged his interlocutors and off-stage onlookers with craft – artistry and guile – shown forth from the start.

The set cracked to reveal the port side of Cyprus, with the sea appearing on the horizon and ruined, bullet-strewn buildings on land. Soldiers milling about were defined through colour: green for Venetians and white for Cypriots. Cassio, obviously green in matters of war, was complaisant as he took charge on the turf of the governor Montano (played by the black actor David Ajao). He smooched Emilia (Ayesha Dharker) on the lips with an all too ‘bold show of courtesy’ (2.1.99), hardly behaving as the refined and courtly Florentine, and so fuelled Iago’s revenge against him. If there was no antagonism set up between Emilia and Iago in the beginning, Desdemona seemed to care little for her: She did not really ‘see’ her. Dharker’s backstory was that ‘she was Indian, had met a soldier of interesting origin, was completely seduced by him and totally in love, and had left quite a lot behind for him’. This Emilia would come into her own only in the play’s final moments; indeed, she would have ‘no speech’ until then (2.1.103). The production cut the banter between Iago and Desdemona (2.1.117–60), since it was hardly necessary to foreground his capacity for improvisation and her ability to understand sexual innuendo, given Msamati’s prowess as an improviser and Vanderham’s strength of character and independent spirit.

One did not have to see the large cross dangling on Othello’s chest to know that he was a (converted) Christian because, upon reaching dry land, he genuflected, kissed the ground and crossed himself (such doings were almost a leitmotif of the production). Catching sight of his ‘fair warrior’ (2.1.180), he truly exuded ‘wonder great as [his] content’ before his ‘soul’s joy’ (2.1.181–2). They embraced passionately; it was the freest we saw Othello and the happiest either would be. The couple was indeed ‘well tuned’, kissing repeatedly on the lips as a sign of love, sexual desire and reverence while Iago’s sinister warning, ‘I’ll set down / The pegs that make this music’ (2.1.198–9), rang off to the side. And singing and music there was: Othello set into motion a night of feasting and festivity (2.2) before lifting Desdemona up and carrying her off. (The animated sequence that followed likely responded to Othello’s notion of Desdemona as one who ‘sings, plays and dances well’ [3.3.188], which Quarshie apparently had wished underscored.) As Iago talked of Cassio’s ‘lechery’ to Roderigo (2.1.255), fires were burning in the back, and everyone was drinking away, including Bianca (Scarlett Brookes) with Cassio so that their relationship could be established and evolve organically. Iago voiced the hot suspicion that Othello might have betrayed him with his wife (2.1.284–310), signalling from behind her while everyone milled around in slow motion, in an almost surreal world enhanced by soft music. This was a dynamic way of having the audience be privy to his inner thoughts of knavery, which indeed were ‘yet confused’ (2.1.309–10). Othello and Desdemona reappeared to dance freely in the centre of a circle, moving their hips, to show not only that it was a celebration of the two of them but also that he had no concern about her kissing him publicly and swaying along with everyone else (in original choreographic movements, arranged by Diane Alison-Mitchell). Though Desdemona eventually pulled Othello off, showing who was ‘in charge’, he followed willingly with a smile, and Emilia went along, unobserved by them.

The merrymaking continued with a rather daring improvisational sequence that foregrounded yet transcended racial politics. It began with Msamati’s Iago intoning a traditional Zimbabwean song to honour the dead; some (onstage) onlookers were struck by it and others paralysed. Cassio, however, barely stood it: He placed an empty beer bottle on Iago’s head as the song came to a close; then, to the background sound of bongo drums struck by live musicians (one black and the other white), he made a cutting rejoinder that spoofed the Caribbean Calypso style. Once Iago had intoned the ‘cannikin clink’ drinking song (2.3.65ff.), there ensued a rapping session between Venice’s white lieutenant and Cyprus’s black governor which escalated into racist slurs on the part of both men. In response to a drunken Cassio’s discriminatory rhyme (the content apparently changed from night-to-night) – ‘A man became a soldier / a top choice I’m sure. / It’s rare to see a black man / on the right side of the law’ – Montano rapped an all-too-‘real’ rejoinder – ‘This man’s a lieutenant so we’d all better run, since we all know what happens when you give white people a gun’ – and then spoke insultingly about ‘taking orders from a Moor’. Cassio responded by shoving Montano, whereupon Iago positioned himself in front of the lieutenant and stared upward rather aggressively; even though Cassio was more than a head taller, Iago controlled the moment. Iago stoked the intensity of that uglier side of Cassio, who would not ‘hear’t again’ (2.3.96) (referring not to Iago’s ‘King Stephen’ song (2.3.85–92) but to Montano’s rap rejoinder), and so segued into Shakespeare’s text (2.3.97ff.) from the improvised sequences. During Cassio’s patronizing gibe against Iago – ‘The lieutenant is to be saved before the ancient’ (2.3.106) – Venetians and Cypriots stared blankly, not daring to move. That Othello had promoted such a man over him could not but have fuelled Iago’s vindictive venom. Montano had reasonably contextualized the earlier moments of ugly racial difficulty and bore no anger when he spoke next to Iago (2.3.116ff.); a loaded reaction was not even insinuated. After Cassio re-entered pursuing Roderigo, all hell broke loose in a choreographed stage fight: Cassio kicked Montano as the latter tried to subdue him, and everyone got involved in the drunken brawling, the women (including Bianca) being even more brutal and effectual than the men. If, in these extra-dramatic sequences, received racial and female stereotypes and categories were made visible, they were also placed in perspective.

Othello stormed in, shirt unbuttoned, and entered the fight wielding a knife; teeth clenched, he grabbed one of the soldiers around the neck and almost strangled him. The general’s violent streak was coming out, his potential for physical threat. As he escalated, pointing his knife, it was the voice and bearing of a man who was used to being in charge. ‘Iago, who began’t’ (2.3.213), he bellowed, roughly pulling the ensign by the arm; every night, according to the director, deep laughter rippled through the audience as Iago named a hyperventilating Michael Cassio as the perpetrator; Cassio’s look of surprise and betrayal read as absolutely genuine. Iago stood wiping his bloody hands during the report, as if to underline – hypocritically – the horror of what had happened.

If, in the playtext, Cassio moves right in to lament the loss of his ‘reputation’ (2.3.258) after Othello has discharged him, the ensemble took time to clear (if not actually clean) the stage of all the drinking debris. Once the soldiers were ushered off, Iago and Cassio practiced ‘active’ (as opposed to ‘passive’) listening in their dialogue, according to Khan’s directives: That they were not ‘silent’ in response to the information given to them encouraged a deeper understanding of and commitment to the dynamics of the moment. The scene was not ‘fixed’ too carefully; rather, the actors ‘played it’. Iago did not yet ‘play the villain’ (2.3.331) but a simple objective, which was to sweep the stage clean. He minimized the problems of ‘too severe a moraler’ (2.3.294) by subtly engaging Cassio in his activity: He allowed him to step on his telltale broom, figuratively a vehicle of ensnarement, as he (Cassio) cursed the ‘invisible spirit of wine’ (2.3.277); and Iago handed Cassio a dustpan to hold, while Iago – paradoxically – swept away the visible mess he had created (‘I could heartily wish this had not befallen’ [2.3.295–6]) and so contained the invisible bullets being projected his way. Of interest to the director was the way in which men talked about women: since the ‘general’s wife’ was then ‘the general’ (2.3.310) and not a deity, her erotic power over her husband should be exploited to mend Cassio’s situation. The discharged officer eventually took the broom and placed it over his shoulder as if it were a rifle (an ironic commentary on his wanting military prowess?), and ‘honest Iago’ (2.3.330) saluted in turn, scoring points off him in the end. Alone onstage, Iago took what seemed like the longest stretch without speaking in theatre history, mumbling only a few ‘clinks’ from the drinking song (2.3.65ff.): it was as if he had the power to stop time. A master of improvisation, he pulled the audience into the moment, eliciting and responding to nervous laughter. Then at long last, he clarified his earlier ‘confused knavery’ (2.1.309–10) and resolved to ‘play the villain’ (2.3.331), despite cynical protestations to the contrary, determining to sweep Cassio, Othello and Desdemona into the ‘net’ that would ‘enmesh them all’ (2.3.356–7). Did his cleaning up and then buttoning himself up suggest a vulnerability, a need for order, as he responded to events?

While Iago thought up having his wife move Cassio’s suit to her mistress, the water-filled centre grille (the second of three aquatic motifs in the production) was reopened for an extra-dramatic sequence of torture; it was not unlike the Abu Ghraib-style of violence that had occurred in an Iraqi prison in 2003. It took place in the battlement area that constituted Othello and Desdemona’s quarters; a massive arch looming behind evoked a ruined sacred space and reflected Islamic and Christian influences on Cyprian architecture. The second that Iago determined not to spoil his plans by failing to move into action (‘Dull not device by coldness and delay’ [2.3.384]), shrieks pierced the background humming of the song the ensign had intoned earlier, in a sense desecrating that traditional air. The site of torture was a pool of water through which a hooded captive was dragged by his limbs (simulating waterboarding?); and ordinary domestic items (staple gun, wooden hammer, electric drill) were strategically placed by the assassin (Ken Nwosu). The point was to underscore the psychological threat of violence and the disempowerment of the person, eerily a prelude of the ‘chaos’ (3.3.92) to come. Taking into account audience expectation, Khan discussed at length with the cast who should be doing the torturing, of what ethnic origin they should be, and whether Othello should be seen to be complicit. Iago belted the captive and used the drill against him; and Othello, passing through with some letters/files (3.2.1), signalled to proceed. Certainly, his endorsement of the abusive measures worked as a prelude to how he would turn them against Iago in seeking proof of his wife’s dishonesty. Since both torturer and tortured were white, while the assassin was black, the situation simultaneously established and critiqued stereotypical notions of whiteness and blackness. The captive was led off, but the torture-laden everyday items remained ominously present; they could exist in either a professional or domestic world. It appeared that Othello and Iago shared not so much a culture of blackness as one of cruel military force.

The interpolated torture sequence merged with 3.3 as a rather insistent Desdemona played with that same assassin’s drill, even pointing it as a gun, all the while that she darted around rather untamed (or ‘haggard’ [3.3.264] as Othello would later conjecture) in pleading Cassio’s suit. She was outfitted in yellow – the brightest colour of the visible spectrum and the most noticeable by the human eye ¹⁹ – which accented her back-length blond hair. Having removed the drill from Desdemona’s hand, the information-age general confirmed his agenda via iPhone. Was this general’s general more interested in recovering friendship for Cassio, or in testing both her authority over Othello and his love for her, especially as she wondered whether she would ‘stand so mamm’ring on’ if he ask something of her (3.3.70)? Othello’s relatively subdued state in the face of his wife’s high (sexualized) energy did not read as a manifestation of marital anxiety. In fact, he moved his mouth towards hers to bestow a kiss on the second ‘I will deny thee nothing’ (3.3.83); but Iago, impatiently wanting to get on with his villainous plot, interrupted the intimate moment with a strategic cough. Iago’s slapping of Othello’s back with a binder – just after the general had expressed love for the ‘excellent wretch’ and prophesied that ‘chaos [would] come again’ (3.3.93) when he loved her not – forewarned that, indeed, that they had ‘work’ to do.

The production eschewed the practice of a proverbial ‘temptation scene’ played as a set piece. From the outset, Quarshie was never quite convinced of Othello’s ‘transformation from a man of reason, sound judgement, and nobility into an emotionally incontinent, insecure, homicidal obsessive in the space of a single scene’ ²⁰ ; how the remarkable (black) man that was Othello could move from thinking (and feeling), ‘Excellent wretch! perdition catch my soul / But I do love thee!’ (3.3.90–1), to ‘I’ll tear her all to pieces!’ (3.3.434), in a span of some 350 lines. ²¹ Structurally, the challenge of the scene is that Shakespeare chooses not to break it, not to change locations, not to have Desdemona and Othello converse, not to give Othello a chance for reflection or for interaction with anyone but Iago. Because there is no ‘cause’ for suspicion, real or plausible, not too much weight was given to the first half of Iago’s insinuations about Cassio and his echoing (or, in the language of psychotherapy, heightening) Othello’s language: the general tried to get a signal on his laptop, while his ensign moved around to set up a crude kind of satellite communication, functioning almost as a ‘human aerial’ as the director put it. (For Khan, the backstory there was that Othello had a certain complacent if not arrogant attitude towards Iago, which impelled the latter to go further with his provocations.) The ‘monster’ in Iago’s thought (3.3.110) was not yet awakened; it was played as though Othello were counselling Iago on how to deal with his (Iago’s) own susceptibility to the ‘green-eyed monster’ that was jealousy (3.3.168), not yet associating himself with the one ‘Who dotes yet doubts, suspects yet strongly loves’ (3.3.173). Othello smiled, patted his friend almost patronisingly on the shoulder and sat him in a chair as if to provide a sense of perspective. The idea was for Quarshie’s Othello to stay distanced from the question, ‘Think’st thou I’d make a life of jealousy?’ (3.3.180), to keep his thinking provisional as long as possible.

Iago’s next speech revealed a change in tactic – the tempter/abuser became specific: ‘I speak not yet of proof: / Look to your wife, observe her well with Cassio’ (3.3.199–200). It was then the actor’s task to ‘move in ordered sequences along an effective and rising dramatic curve’. ²² If Othello glanced up from reading and laughed in disbelief as he heard Cassio named, he turned serious on the thought of Desdemona giving out ‘such a seeming / To seal her father’s eyes up’ (3.3.212–13), produced a half-smile in avowing that his spirits were dashed ‘not a jot’ (3.3.219) and barked a ‘NO’ in disavowing being ‘much moved’ (3.3.228); his somatic responses had begun to belie his words. Visibly affected while Iago all but attributed ‘a will most rank, / Foul disproportion, thoughts unnatural’ (3.3.236–7) to Desdemona, he bellowed out a second ‘farewell’ (3.3.242) to the (black) man he was ‘bound to’ (3.3.217) who dared play with his mind thus. It was clear that, as he slowly packed away all of the satellite communication equipment, Iago had packed Othello’s head with perverse paraphernalia. Saluting, the ensign took his leave in his own protracted time; the power dynamic in the scene had shifted. If the production was criticized for such ‘fiddling’ with equipment, insofar as that sort of ‘visual faffery distract[ed] from the dialogue’, ²³ the following observation from the world of film is arguably apropos of Msamuti’s performance: ‘The telling could not be more alive. The characters may be stuck; the camera is on the move. Watch it stir and glide, never wild or abrupt but as stealthy as a sleuth’. ²⁴

There were titters in the audience as Othello, once alone, invoked Iago’s ‘exceeding honesty’ (3.3.261). He played that speech as if he were testing ideas. Because he was ‘black’, was he lacking in the ‘those soft parts of conversation / That chamberers have’? Was he declining ‘Into the vale of years’? (not that much, he indicated, by provocatively swinging his hips). Was she ‘gone’? Was he ‘abused’? Must his only ‘relief’ be ‘to loathe her’? (3.3.267–72). Doubt was difficult to eradicate once it set in, regardless of race, age or creed. As Desdemona entered, Othello’s test appeared to be over: ‘If she be false…/ I’ll not believe it’ (3.3.282–3). Wife was not careful around husband; she moved freely and he allowed it, grabbing and kissing her to the strum of soft guitar music. As they embraced, a large, black handkerchief with red strawberries embroidered in the four corners slipped to the floor: black, in accordance with the description of it as having been ‘dyed in mummy’ (3.4.76), instead of white, in line with the woman’s ‘white virginity’ (a ‘facile’ association, in the director’s eyes), thereby becoming a signifier of Othello’s past.

What Khan considered facile was the routine critical and pedagogical viewpoint concerning ‘the metonymic connection between handkerchief, wedding sheets and Desdemona’s body’: ²⁵ whether that meant ‘a visually recognisable reduction of Othello and Desdemona’s wedding-bed, the visual proof of their consummated marriage’; ²⁶ or ‘visual proof of Desdemona’s adultery largely because it subconsciously evokes for Othello the blood-stained sheets of the wedding-bed and his wife’s loss of virginity there’. ²⁷ The directorial choice not to assume that the handkerchief was white, but to perform its blackness echoed (however coincidentally) the challenge posed by Ian Smith regarding the ways in which issues of race have conditioned readers (and spectators) to see a ‘white’ handkerchief in the play. Smith points out that the Egyptian memento ‘dyed in mummy’ that signified marital fidelity could refer alternately to the black bituminous substance mentioned in medieval and early modern medical treatises, to a black liquid removed from mummified corpses and to the black colour of mummified corpses themselves. ²⁸ He then associates the black cloth of the handkerchief with Othello’s body (rather than with Desdemona’s in its white incarnation), calling to mind the early modern stage practice of representing Africans in performance as wearing black cloth to mimic black skin, thereby ‘producing and circulating a material notion of race’: thus, he argues, a black handkerchief ‘constitutes a fitting, virtually self-explanatory symbol of the play’s central but controversial interracial marriage’. ²⁹ In some sense, the reification onstage of a black handkerchief performed scholarly speculation by blurring a historical/cultural/referential reading and a symbolical/allegorical reading of the object: ‘blackness as the underlying “reality” toward which critical attention should turn’ and ‘blackness as a theatrical (and political and cultural) effect’, a ‘touchstone for response on and off the stage’. ³⁰ In Khan’s production, the staging of a black handkerchief was anything but ‘facile’.

Background guitar strumming quickened as Emilia took up the telltale napkin and then stopped abruptly as she placed it in her bosom; clearly, her first loyalty was not to the lady she served but to her husband. There was virtually no relationship between the two women, unlike in Trevor Nunn’s 1989 production, for example, which gave greater weight to the Desdemona-Emilia (Imogen Stubbs and Zoë Wanamaker) connection and to the dramatic ‘history’ of the pipe-smoking Emilia with Iago. ³¹ When Dharker’s Emilia kissed Iago passionately after he took the handkerchief, he stared at her immobilized; the director’s take for that moment was that she had sabotaged him by not asking permission to bestow such a kiss. Their relationship was played as broken though not abusive; there was still love between the pair. An unnerved Iago vented by obsessively cleaning spots on the floor and repeatedly slamming down the lid on a small metal chest (strong enough to support his heavy pounding!). Then he compulsively positioned a chair, as if trying to regain a state of self-possession, and sat down to think and come up with the idea of losing that black token, spread out on his lap, in Cassio’s lodging (3.3.324ff.): another instance of the actor’s deliberately and skilfully stopping narrative time, here to display a meta-level of self-fashioning around his character’s inner self. Msamati’s Iago came off the page onto the stage, not as a representation of ‘medieval Vice’, nor as a representation of ‘hate for hate’s sake’, nor as a character devoid of a ‘second dimension’, ³² nor just as an improviser aware of himself as an improviser who ‘revels in his ability to manipulate his victims, to lead them by the nose like asses, to possess their labor without their ever being capable of grasping the relation in which they are enmeshed’. ³³ This Iago was affected by his wife’s sexual overture, perhaps because, according to the director, ‘the motive-hunting of motiveless Malignity’ ³⁴ once attributed to him – revenge in part for (supposedly) being cuckolded by both Othello and Cassio – was nothing more than a rationalization. Msamati was brilliant in enacting – and extending – those passing moments of inner conflict.

When Othello re-entered in a state of ‘waked wrath’ (3.3.366) and ridden with doubt, he was nonetheless calculating and strategically in control even if worked up. He laid aside a dossier, uttered, ‘Ha! Ha! false to me?’ (3.3.336), faced an unsuspecting Iago and, to low-level but strident sounds that punctuated the tension in the sequence, punched him in the stomach so that he fell, doubled-over. (The powerful ‘Farewell’ speech that follows in Shakespeare’s text [3.3.351–60] was withheld until the end of the scene.) If the stage direction indicates ‘Catching hold of him’ (3.3.363), and in the Norton edition (based on the First Quarto of 1622 rather than the First Folio of 1623), ‘Taking Iago by the throat’, ³⁵ Othello went much further in terms of corporeal assault. For Khan, the idea was for Othello to deploy ‘reasonable’ methods of acquiring intelligence in a kind of private military interrogation, placing Iago in as much jeopardy as possible to get the appropriate response. The logic of the moment was that a man’s ability to withstand such torture would persuasively reinforce the truth he was telling, so that there would be no reason not to believe him.

Launching right in with ‘Villain, be sure you prove my love a whore’ (3.3.362), Othello tied Iago to a chair and performed a series of Abu-Ghraib-style tortures on him, not surprisingly, given his endorsement of such military methods earlier when a prisoner had been punished in an interpolated scene, in which Iago himself had participated: An ironic case of the torturer turned tortured, the manipulator manipulated, and of the general (ab)using his power. It was as though all the ‘cords or knives’ or and the ‘suffocating streams’ (of breath?) (3.3.391–2) that he could exploit to furnish proof of Desdemona’s (dis)honesty were reified on stage. The physical contest between the two had the following salient beats: Othello appropriated Iago’s knife and threatened him with it; he all but plucked out Iago’s eyes while screeching, ‘Make me to see’t’ (3.3.367), calling up (for this reviewer) that horrific scene in King Lear in which Gloucester was blinded; at ‘On horror’s head horrors accumulate’ (3.3.373), he used a claw hammer to cut into Iago’s right ear, forcing blood to spurt onto his chest; set ‘on the rack’ (3.3.338; the line was transposed to follow 3.3.377), he placed a plastic bag over Iago’s head and virtually smothered him on ‘I found not Cassio’s kisses on her lips’ (3.3.344) (made to precede, ‘I think my wife be honest, and think she is not, / I think that thou art just, and think thou art not’ [3.3.387–8]). If all were calculated, interrogatory actions, the guttural sound interspersed between ‘I’ll not endure it’ and ‘Would I were satisfied!’ (3.3.393) indicated that Othello was losing perspective; and his wielding the hammer to cut into Iago at the jugular on ‘Give me a living reason she’s disloyal’ (3.3.412) suggested that he had likely lost control. If Othello’s proverbial words – ‘Her name, that was as fresh / As Dian’s visage, is now begrimed and black / As mine own face’ (3.3.389–91) – are potentially charged with (self)-deprecating or racial undertones, that potentiality did not surface for this reviewer. This was not just because those lines, as played, conveyed the very human anguish of a man gripped by doubt but also because they underscored, however briefly, what has been termed ‘the greyer areas between [American] constructions of Shakespeare and [American] constructions of race’; the perennial ‘instability’ with regard to such a relationship. ³⁶

Iago invented Cassio’s erotic ‘dream’, as much to satisfy Othello’s demand for proof as to release himself from bondage and get on with his plot, but he was not a ‘lip-smacking villain’, as the director put it; rather, gasping for breath after having been so throttled by Othello, he played the dream as a kind of humiliation so as to seem more persuasive. The more sexually explicit the details became, the more Othello was gripped; he showed signs of the stress that would lead to his physical collapse later as he intermittently brandished that hammer at Iago’s throat. Side-comments, such as ‘O monstruous!’ and ‘I’ll tear her all to pieces’ (3.3.428, 434), were suppressed, presumably because pauses and the business with the hammer spoke louder than verbal reactions. Once Iago invoked the trump card of the ex-lieutenant wiping his beard with the handkerchief bequeathed to Desdemona, Othello was visibly taken aback, interpolating Cassio’s name in utter disbelief, to especially strident background sounds that almost stopped the action. (Interestingly, ‘a ‘lieutenant’ – from the French lieu, ‘place,’ and tenant, ‘holding’ – is one who holds, or takes, the place of another’. ³⁷ ) As the idea of ‘revenge’ (3.3.446) entered his head, Othello unshackled Iago from the chair but continued almost to strangle him. It was essential for the production’s trajectory, nonetheless, that the lie about the handkerchief not yet lead Othello to ‘see’ that Desdemona’s infidelity was ‘true’ (3.3.447). Since the truth was still in question, that line would be spoken after he had watched Iago joke with Cassio about Bianca (4.1.167ff.). If, in the ‘Propontic sea’ speech, he swore that his ‘bloody thoughts’ would never look back, and he went down on his knees ‘[i]n the due reverence of a sacred vow’ (3.3.460, 464) with Iago joining him, there was also a sense of inner struggle: according to Khan, ‘Othello was trying to maintain the murderous intensity but was continually being sabotaged by the pity of it’. Though Iago seemed a bit disjointed as he promised to ‘give up / The execution of his wit, hands, heart, / To wronged Othello’s service’ (3.3.468–70), he was back in mental control as the object of his hatred went to embrace (rather than throttle) him, lift him up, ‘greet [his] love’ (3.3.472) and agree to an action: the death of Cassio.

As Iago proposed that Desdemona be allowed to live (3.3.477), Othello tried to smash the chair where the ensign had been tortured – the seat of doubt, as it were – but he could not bring himself even to lift it up. He ‘damned’ Desdemona (3.3.478) to the background beat of military tympani and then launched climatically into the transposed ‘Farewell the tranquil mind’ speech (3.3.351–60). As he bid farewell to ‘the plumed troops and the big wars’ (3.3.352), he shredded the papers contained in the dossier he had laid aside and tossed the bits around – prefiguring his shredded reputation and loss of professional self? And when he spoke of ‘Pride, pomp and circumstance of glorious war!’ (3.3.357), he hurled the dossier cover at that seat of doubt and knocked it over: it was as though he were done discharging affairs of state. There was meant to be mutual love as Othello embraced Iago and professed him his ‘lieutenant’, and Iago promised to be ‘[his] own for ever’ (3.3.481–2). Iago saluted, and Othello tried to salute in kind but clearly had ‘a pain upon [his] forehead’ (3.3.288). Had he linked uncertainty about a domestic betrayal to betrayals on the battlefield, so that the private and the public were muddled and intertwined in his mind? ³⁸ So, where was Othello at the end of the scene, just before the interval? For the director, he was a man caught in doubt and not resolved to action. In the hands of Quarshie and Msamati, the ‘temptation scene’ was an achievement of acting and reacting in the moment on the part of two consummate professionals.

Haunting flute music played on an authentic Eastern instrument marked the transition to the production’s second half. Othello demanded the black handkerchief ‘dyed in mummy’ (3.4.76) during an ‘English tea party’ set up by Desdemona so that Cassio could take his suit to the general. If that choice seemed to trivialize the issue, the point was to heighten Desdemona’s naïveté as she contemplated enabling Cassio’s reinstatement without knowing how high the stakes had become. Othello, still beset by doubt, dissembled by seeming to enjoy the tea party game while Desdemona flirted and exuded love; she stroked his chest on ‘For ‘twas that hand that gave away my heart’ (3.4.45), and he played along, touching her ‘liberal hand’ (3.4.46) to his face. But once she returned to the ‘promise’ regarding Cassio, Othello’s demeanour shifted: he bowed his head, cupped it in his hands and prophetically asked for the handkerchief he had given her. Desdemona continued to pour tea, and Othello reverted to the mode by which he had wooed her, telling the ‘story’ of the handkerchief, all the while that a silent and still Emilia stood looking on. Her absent presence underlined how disaster could ensue because women too were not always ‘what they seemed’ (cf. Iago, 3.3.129): she neither allowed them to ‘know [her] thoughts’ (cf. Othello, 3.3.164), nor said what was ‘true’ (cf. Othello, 3.3.447), about a lost and found handkerchief. The tension rose as an increasingly headstrong Desdemona and an ever more infuriated Othello alternated in a kind of stichomythia between Cassio’s suit and ‘The Handkerchief!’ until the general went off, his face livid with anger; for Vanderham, it was about the discomfiture of a couple having their first argument. Emilia’s presence was felt, virtually for the first time, when she unsettled the wife by expressing the hope that there was no ‘jealous toy’ (3.4.157) in the husband’s mind. Desdemona’s reply, ‘I never gave him cause’ (3.4.158), spoke volumes.

Indeed, that black handkerchief dominated the next sequences, from an animated Bianca’s ‘jealousy’ over Cassio’s desire to have it copied (3.4.185), to Iago’s repeated allusion to it, almost as an incantation, as Othello knelt, struggling with the image of Desdemona offering an ‘unauthorized kiss’ or being ‘naked in bed’ (4.1.2, 5). Background drumbeats underscored Iago’s association of Desdemona’s honour with the handkerchief (4.1.17–19). Then Othello again turned violent, grabbing his ensign by the lapels and shaking him. As he imagined Cassio lying ‘with her, on her’ (4.1.34ff.), he began losing control: his epileptic fit was played as a form of transient ischemic attack or mini-stroke. Quarshie’s Othello explored the infirmity in detail as it invaded his body: he trembled, his face drooped, his left arm dropped immobilized, he slurred his words, he stammered out, ‘Confess! handkerchief! O devil!’ (4.1.43) and then collapsed. When he came to, floundering and faltering in his speech, Iago got him to stand ‘a while apart’ (4.1.75) by pushing him into a subterranean space, as it were, under that same central grille raised over a pool of water. The director’s point was to show Othello not as a ‘noble Moor’ but as a man suffering in a humiliating situation and going ‘mad’ (4.1.101) as he tried to discover the truth. While Iago staged a joking conversation with Cassio about Bianca’s infatuation for him, Othello refrained from (mis)interpreting the smiles and gestures (those lines were omitted), so that his reaction remained unclear. The (un)timely entrance of Bianca, angry and standing on her dignity as a marginalized woman, conveyed that others were being humiliated as well. The black handkerchief could not but be ‘see[n]’ (4.1.170) as Bianca tossed it, Iago retrieved it and Cassio pocketed it.

Othello struggled out from under the grille and pointed a knife towards Iago, who recoiled until he realized that the instrument signified the murder of Cassio. At the repeated evocation of the handkerchief (4.1.170), Othello murmured the transposed line, ‘Now do I see ‘tis true’ (cf. 3.3.447), and pointed the knife at his own chest (presaging his final act of suicide?). As he oscillated in tears between ‘nine years a-killing’ and ‘[a] fine woman, a fair woman, a sweet woman!’ (4.1.175–6), gentle background music helped him keep playing the sweet note underneath the violence, thereby heightening the conflict swelling within. He lay prone, with Iago straddling him, until the climatic thought, ‘I will chop her into messes!’ (4.1.197), overcame ‘the pity of it’ (4.1.193); he then got up, resolved to kill her that night. If the die had been cast as Iago counselled him to ‘strangle her in her bed’ (4.1.204), Othello still struggled, head bent into a folded white handkerchief, if not for lack of resolve, for a need to stage an ‘honourable’ death (‘the justice of it’ [4.1.206]).

The grille descended for the arrival of a matter-of-fact Lodovico amidst a contrastive musical flourish. Othello was obviously unnerved, often holding his head, though his delivery of ‘Fire and brimstone!’ (4.1.233) was restrained even after having read that Cassio would replace him in Cyprus – a professional betrayal in his mind – and again heard Desdemona’s plea to mend the breach with Cassio. There appeared to be residue weakness on his left side from his neurological attack (evidence of the actor’s attention to detail) when, upon calling her ‘Devil’ (4.1.239), he struck Desdemona across the face. The effect of the proverbial slap, according to the director, was not only to humiliate Desdemona, Lodovico and Venice but also to objectify her qua woman to allow him to do to her what he deemed he must. As Desdemona walked off, undoubtedly retaining some of Othello’s agony, and as Emilia moved to follow, he roughly held back the waiting lady, obviously with the idea of questioning her. He went off repeating ‘Goats and monkeys!’ (4.1.263) with teeth clenched, words still inside his head from when Iago had trumped up sexual images of disloyalty earlier (cf. 3.3.405–8). A rather unsettled Iago remained behind; his objective right then was to follow Othello forthwith to keep him in control.

Desdemona protested her innocence with dignity and strength, kneeling not in a ‘closet’ but in a private chapel area created by lighting effects and a huge cross suspended down in open space from the balcony: for the director, it was a kind of ‘conversation with the divine’. Othello knelt beside her, bequeathed her his cross on ‘the devils themselves / Should fear to seize thee’ (4.2.37–8), and then bent over and wept; we were witnessing a man’s heartbreak. She lifted his head up and spoke in his face, ‘I hope my noble lord esteems me honest’ (4.2.66), trying in all innocence to save the relationship. They fell into each other’s arms as he invoked the sensual, if damning, image of a weed pretending to be a beautiful flower (4.2.68–70); then, face cupped in hands, he pushed her away on the curse, ‘[W]ould thou hadst ne’er been born!’ (4.2.70). The director opined that, if theatre history finds evidence of a ‘rampaging Othello in the second half, a black man reverting to type, just playing violence or wailing and moaning’, Qharshie’s Othello ‘did justice to the beauty, agony, and pity of those moments’. Khan also conjectured that, had Desdemona not mentioned having committed an ‘ignorant sin’ (4.2.71, emphasis added), Othello might not have pursued the ‘cause’; it was her specific use of language that provoked the reality of the situation she was not understanding. Hardly temperamentally weak as she swore she was no ‘strumpet’ but a ‘Christian’ (4.2.84), Desdemona fought for the love she bore her husband. Moving off, Othello buried his head in the shoulder of Emilia, who had just entered, and on ‘there’s money for your pains’ (4.2.95), forced his marriage ring into her palm; an extra-textual (re)action that spoke volumes about his disturbed state of mind. However much the relationship between Othello and Desdemona had soured in the text, on stage those were still two characters acting, reacting and interacting, albeit to no avail.

Lady and waiting lady were not yet in a place where they could talk; Desdemona continued to be dismissive of Emilia, neither revealing her feelings nor softening (‘I cannot weep’ [4.2.105]), but playing her status as she tried to fathom how she could have been called ‘such as she said my lord did say I was’ (4.2.121). Chills undoubtedly rippled through the audience when a strong and vexed Emilia stated the issue in black and white terms: ‘The Moor’s been abused by some villainous knave’ (4.2.141). Iago, obviously unnerved and conflicted, stood with his back to Desdemona, as if unable to face the victim of his hatred. As she knelt, her voice trembled, and she finally broke down in saying the unsayable: ‘I cannot say whore’ (4.2.163). Once she said ‘whore’, Khan opined, it was as though ‘the word opened up a valve, and her heart could be felt trying to make sense of things’. Iago moved, as if to leave, but then knelt expressionless and put his arms around her; he was clearly repelled as she cried into his breast. That moment was significant on two counts: Iago revealed a lack of ease with himself; and Emilia arguably suffered as she watched him (seem to) show sympathy, since he had ceased to be so connected to her. Desdemona kissed Iago on the cheek before she exited; repulsed, he bent over and rubbed the spot fervently with his scarf, as if to exorcise any trace of human contact – as an angry Roderigo dashed in to rail against the injustice done to him. The question for the director was: just how much of all that talk had Roderigo heard? This production’s Iago was constantly thrown curves to which he had to react and respond; indeed, as Roderigo said, his ‘words and performances’ were often ‘no kin together’ (4.2.184). The master improviser was not so – always already – in control and in charge as performance history has frequently made him out to be.

If previously the presence of water in that central grille area was meant to evoke a Venice thriving on business and commerce, and then to accompany practices of terror and torture in Cyprus under Othello’s command, it was finally intended to summon up a reflection pool literally and figuratively; as the director put it, ‘the possibility of healing and communication’. At long last, the two women started talking to one another in an encounter filled with foreboding yet punctuated with genuine laughter. Wetting her feet in the pool just after associating bed sheets with shrouding sheets (4.3.22–3), Desdemona suddenly flicked water Emilia’s way and her customary dismissive tone softened. As she recalled Barbary’s song of ‘willow’ (4.3.39ff.), she offered access to a different Desdemona without the power of speech: her voice exuded emotion though not talented singing, and she was less caustic and contained with her waiting lady. Her underlying anxiety was apparent when, out of fear, she abruptly changed registers and screeched on ‘Hark, who is’t that / knocks?’ though it was only the wind (4.3.52–3). The segment on wives cheating on husbands was played not as a set piece, but as a real conversation in which two people listened and reacted to one another. Desdemona’s youth and innocence, as well as her genuine love for her husband, showed forth. Her final ‘Good night’ (4.3.103; cf. 4.3.57) read not only as another interruption of the moment but also as a rejection of her waiting lady; she had reverted to her characteristically dismissive attitude. That the scene had an emotive effect on the audience was noted by the director, who often watched the house reaction rather than the stage action; many were brought to tears as they inevitably (but inappositely) played the ending in their minds.

If the killing of Roderigo and the wounding of Cassio took place in darkness, Bagnall’s lighting/set design deployed a generator, an apparatus appropriate for a Cyprian base limited in technology, in order for the audience to see the action. In that scene of quick entrances and exits, the actors had the added challenge of not slipping on the grille that was not entirely dry following the previous pool sequence – befitting, in some sense, action that turned on a series of mishaps. Significantly highlighted in the scene was the way in which one woman viewed another woman who had made different choices: Emilia was especially contemptuous of Bianca, violently taking her by the neck after calling her ‘strumpet’ (5.1.121) – once more marking going-for-the-jugular as a recurring motif. Bianca’s self-defence – ‘I am no strumpet / But of life as honest as you, that thus / Abuse me’ (5.1.121–3) – was heard loud and clear; in this production, the ‘other’ was given a definite voice, so as not to reduce the play’s potential purely to a black-and-white viewpoint.

The lights remained low in order to create an intimate, domestic feel while Desdemona lay asleep on a futon bed (deemed appropriate for an Eastern setting) under a white bedcover bordered in blood red, and complemented by a red velour headrest with fringes. Othello entered wearing a shoulder holster and bearing a sword. He was restrained in his delivery of ‘It is the cause’ speech (5.2.1–22), resisting its inherent lyricism. Rather, he searched for the complexity of inner conflict: he studied the prone figure and arranged a white blanket at the foot of the bed, apparently to complete the image; he kissed her before speaking ‘O balmy breath /…Justice to break her sword!’ (5.2.16–17); when she stirred and embraced him, after having been kissed on ‘Once more, and that’s the last’ (5.2.19), he hesitated and then pulled away; once she awoke, his tone became caustic. His crossing himself intermittently suggested that his thoughts of killing were motivated from within his Christian identity, not from his former Islam religion. Desdemona was feisty if panicked as she exhorted, ‘I hope you will not kill me’ (5.2.35), in a high-pitched voice, to grating background sounds; queried in matter-of-fact mode, ‘So: what’s the matter?’ (5.2.47), in an effort to extend the moment; and emphatically defended her dignity and sense of honour on ‘I never did / Offend you in my life’ (5.2.58). They stood facing each other as Desdemona learned of Cassio’s death; when their heads moved towards one another (as if to kiss?), Othello grabbed her by the neck and wrestled her down to the bed, where he finished strangling the life out of her but not without a struggle. He arranged her hands, pulled the ecclesial-like bedding up to her neck and briefly observed his handiwork – arguably to create an image of ‘sacrifice’ instead of ‘murder’ (5.2.65) – before responding to Emilia’s cries from without. His violence extended to Emilia, whom he grabbed from behind when she determined to ‘report the truth’ (5.2.126). If there were so many moments when an effaced Emilia could have reported the truth (however much derailing Shakespeare’s play!), she impressively made her voice heard as she tried to expiate her guilt in naming Othello a ‘devil’ (5.2.131), wishing for Iago’s ‘pernicious soul’ to ‘rot’ (5.2.151–2) were he so implicated, and refusing to ‘hold [her] peace’ (5.2.216) about having found the handkerchief and given it to her husband.

After Iago silenced Emilia forever by cutting her throat from behind (though he also wanted her to leave and be protected), the story was trimmed to make the action move quickly: omitted, for example, were Othello’s reference to having a weapon (5.2.245–69) and the repetitive contents of a letter found in Roderigo’s pocket (304–15, 322–6). Othello spoke an interpolated line, ‘Why should honor outlive honesty?’, knelt as he evoked the ‘pale’ and ‘cold’ Desdemona (5.2.270–4), clasped his hands in prayer, emitted an extended ‘O Desdemon! dead…O, O!’ (5.2.279), and lay by her – as Lodovico and Cassio entered, the latter on crutches. There was a moment of anagnorisis, as he realized how Iago had ‘ensnared [his] soul and body’ (5.2.299). Seeking to control how the narrative would be reported back to Venice, Othello began his final speech in the rational tone of a general, but then shifted into that of a broken husband as he spoke of ‘one that loved, not wisely, but too well’ (5.2.342), and was in tears as he brought up the rich ‘pearl’ thrown away (5.2.345). He then got on his knees, looked once more at Desdemona and stabbed himself. He curled in the foetal position and died, not ‘upon a kiss’ (5.2.357) but upon an insult, as Lodovico’s foot pushed him onto his side. His tragic finale was consciously contained but no less poignant and moving.

Iago discharged choked laughter as Lodovico pronounced the final censure, to the background sound of tympani. Asked whether the ensign got what he deserved by continuing to live at the end, whether Othello should have killed Iago before killing himself, Msamati opined:

My instinctive reaction is that death is too easy a punishment for Iago. Because he’s expecting it. What he’s not expecting is to have the world go, ‘You see this, you see what you did’. This guy is a soldier; he deals in death every day; that’s what he does. So, death is not scary to him. He’s not actually afraid of dying. He’s afraid of living [laughing]. He can’t love his own wife. He melts down like a lovesick teenager at being betrayed and does all this stuff. This is not someone who loves life terribly. ³⁹

The production’s ‘Gestalt’: More than the sum of its parts

Masamati and Quarshie returned to the stage after the curtain call and embraced. Their work together in performance, and that of the entire cast, had been a milestone in (British) theatre history of the play, moving beyond clearly defined, opposing principles or issues – beyond black and white – in terms of casting and other production choices. In this mise en scène, the protagonist was not the estranged outsider – the gullible Moor of Venice. He was persuasively a general settled in his professional identity, and a husband contented in his conjugal relationship, until doubt, suspicion and jealousy killed his love, causing forms of martial violence to manifest themselves in marital affairs. And the antagonist was not the ‘malignant racist’, ⁴⁰ at times being the target of racist remarks himself, but plausibly a subordinate whose deep sense of betrayal in both martial and marital matters drove him perversely to ‘abuse Othello’s ear’ (1.3.394) and take revenge. Nor was the female lead the sweet and gentle angelic creature but realistically a tough, independent and sexy woman. More broadly, and to return to the representative scenarios of storytelling as framed above by Thompson, Khan’s production was a visually complex and multivalent representation: as much about race (there were contextualized racial slurs and instances of ‘internalized racism’) as about doubt and jealousy; as about divisions of gender and class (not only the often condescending attitude of Desdemona towards Emilia but also the latter’s disparagement of Bianca, who stood on her dignity and craved self-respect); and as about a domestic tragedy framed within a cruel military narrative.

The organized whole perceived as more than the sum of its parts (the production’s Gestalt), by casting both Othello and Iago as black in a culturally and racially diverse milieu, expanded the ground from which those fictional figures habitually emerged. It was, not so much a question of a double focus of ‘black zebra with white stripes’ or ‘white zebra with black stripes’, as of the emergence of a new figure that privileged a double focus of blackness – in happy accordance with embryological findings that the ‘default’ colour of the zebra is indeed black. ⁴¹ At the risk of exploding the business of the zebra optical illusion beyond credible limits, suffice it to say that the production arguably pushed the boundaries of the application towards multiple zebras in a zebra crosswalk, working to ‘destabilize’ both Shakespeare’s Othello and race, to ‘shift the foundation[s] so that new angles, vantages, and perspectives [could be] created’. ⁴² The play did not come across as either Othello- or Iago-centred but as a choreographed dance between Quarshie and Msamati vis-à-vis their characters, which involved intense concentration, proactive and reactive synchronization in performance and trustable coordination with the rest of the cast. Masterly ensemble performances in a refreshingly ‘unmooring’ staging apposite to an ever-changing global world. ⁴³