Can Othello be decolonised?

Taking artistic liberties with Shakespeare’s plays has become somewhat of a theatrical sport. It’s a necessary and riveting pursuit that sustains interest in overly familiar plays like Othello, which many have dissected at school. How do you make a play relevant to audiences who know the plot and bloody ending in advance? This has naturally made Othello vulnerable to creative revisions, particularly in the hands of African-based theatre makers, who take the opportunity to lay bare the latent racial themes.

Lara Foot’s adaptation (or co-opting) of Shakespeare’s Othello, now showing at the Baxter Theatre in Cape Town, is less an Africanising of this seminal play and more of a

re-contextualising of it in an African milieu and from a postcolonial perspective. Foot dubs this process as “decolonising” Othello. 

“Our objective for Othello, the character, along with his love Desdemona, was to attempt to rewrite his history,” she writes. Instead of the action playing out in Cyprus, it’s set in Namibia, South West Africa, as it was previously named during the colonial era. Othello’s African origin is used by the Germans to quell an uprising in this African colony. Someone calls him an “Askari” — a term associated with spies for the apartheid-era state. 

The ochre and red-toned mounds of cloth that form part of the set referring to the Namibian desert make Othello’s descent into an irrational and murderous state, more believable — we associate madness with isolation in tough climates. Those ’80s Afrikaans TV dramas set in Namibian deserts come to mind.

Adding to this Southern African vibe are some of the lines being delivered in isiXhosa by Othello (played by Atandwa Kani) and others, while Iago (Albert Pretorius) and his German superiors and Cassio (Carlo Daniels) sometimes speak in Afrikaans. This situates the characters, and the society as a multiracial and multicultural one, evoking the Western or Eastern Cape in particular where these two languages are more commonly spoken. But Foot not only applies a lingual twist but a cultural one too. When Othello is feeling confused, angry and on the edge of madness he wanders into a forest and appeals to his ancestors for guidance, and succour. 

This lingual and cultural layer adds a different kind of gravitas to Iago’s jealousy and hatred of Othello — in this context, it’s easy to imagine that it’s racially motivated and fuelled by white-male entitlement and the irrational fear provoked by a racial inversion of roles. That Cassio happens to be of colour and is also appointed a higher position than Iago in the army further substantiates this racialised reading. 

Pretorius channels a particularly authentic version of the back-stabbing Iago. He relays the two sides of this character — a trusting confidante and a conspiring traitor — with impressive ease. What is particularly unnerving, given the racial and sociopolitical layers, is the audience’s seeming collusion with him — his soliloquies make us privy to his rotten schemes. Of course, this is what makes this narrative so compelling — in knowing what Iago plans, the events play out like a slow car crash you wish you could stop. 

Certainly, Foot does attempt to “rescue” Othello from the fate Shakespeare had in mind. For starters she arms him with Frantz Fanon quotes, which, it has to be said, slip into Shakespeare’s early modern English almost without notice — they’ve been cunningly adapted to do so. These Fanonesque attributions, gleaned from the writings of this black postcolonial theorist, allow Othello to voice the racism he’s been subjected to and, inserted in the text after one of his fits, imply that his rage against his perceived betrayal by Desdemona, a white character, is bundled in with his despair with ingrained racism. Fanon did, after all, argue that “interracial desire is a form of self-destruction”.

“I am not a man, black is not a man. I am in a zone of non-being, an extraordinarily sterile and arid region,” states Othello after one of his fits. 

Foot’s Othello is not only battling the suspicions that Iago has been feeding him, but also the “text” itself — which is structured to position him as Iago’s “puppet” who can be manipulated to the point of committing murder. This is where Foot intervenes altering the events of the climax. Foot set out to disrupt the “violent black man” image, she asserts. This might have some Shakespearean purists up in arms. When Foot shared her doubts about taking such liberties with Kani, he retorted: “They have had their turn.”

You could argue that most Shakespearean characters in his tragedies are violent — and this was an expression of those times. Regrettably, the violent ending with women murdered makes this play an expression of our times — given the high rates of gender-based violence (GBV) in our country. 

It’s a pity that Foot was unable to rewrite the fate of the two main female characters and how the women are positioned in this play. 

It’s galling to hear Desdemona (most excellently played by Carla Smith) talk about her “obedience” and indeed her perceived lack of it contributing to her tragic end. Her father’s sense of betrayal that she got married without his knowledge and Othello’s notion that she must be violently punished for her perceived betrayal of him affirms her status as an object, a possession owned and controlled by men.

If only Foot could have put the words of Judith Butler, the gender theorist, in Desdemona’s mouth and allowed her to articulate her oppression. Some men might argue that women of that era would not have had any desire to challenge the patriarchal society. 

This naturally, leads you to wonder what are the boundaries, and limits of “decolonising” a seminal historical text. What can be unwritten without the fundamental plot falling to pieces? Who can rightfully do so? The fact this endeavour raises so many questions is, in part, what makes it interesting, forcing audiences to reconsider what’s valuable about Shakespeare’s writing in the present day. 

The renowned visual artist Gerhard Marx, responsible for the set design and costumes, delivers reduced lines (frames suggesting walls) and aesthetics which suggests a form of deconstruction at play, a dissection of the past through the lens of the present. The best example is a backdrop composed of an image inspired by his 2012 work “Land’s End Composite”, presenting a skull configured by pieces of a dated map from the Mediterranean — perhaps near the original setting of the play — Cyprus.   

The excellent cast that Foot has assembled breathes such life into Shakespeare’s words that you’re reminded of what a great writer he was, even if he was a product of his times. Peripheral characters, such as Roderigo, played by Wessel Pretorius, become essential due to his rendering of this character, who offers necessary light relief. 

Smith, replete in floaty white dresses and capable of beautiful song, makes you think of her as a dainty bird. Kani, the son of the esteemed acting legend John Kani, carries the heavy burden of stepping directly into his father’s shoes. Kani Senior famously played Othello in the late eighties at the Market Theatre. Armed with Fanon’s words, however, he can step out from his father’s shadow and take his Othello somewhere this character has not been before. 

* Othello is showing at the Baxter Theatre in Cape Town until May 4.