Shakespeare’s tragedy was in some ways prophetic in its portrayal of a Black hero. Ahead of Elysium Theatre Company’s touring production, which sets the play in the context of the Bush and Obama years, we asked director Jake Murray about how this play’s moment has come (again), and why it might be the right entry point for anyone in the North who is seeing Shakespeare for the first time.

Ben Okri famously said that ‘If Othello did not begin as a play about race, then history has made it one’ – a quote that seems all the more apposite in the wake of movements like Black Lives Matter or efforts to ‘decolonise’ theatre. In what ways do you feel that your planning for this Othello has been different from what you might have done, say, ten years ago?

I don’t think Othello was ever not ‘about race’, even if what we mean by that may have changed over the centuries. Shakespeare’s decision to make a Moor a tragic hero, to place a black character right at the centre of one of his most powerful plays, not as a villain (as with Aaron the Moor in Titus Andronicus) or an almost comic character (the Prince of Morocco in The Merchant of Venice), but as a titanic character of the same stature as Hamlet, Lear, Macbeth or any great tragic hero, was a powerful statement overturning stereotypes and prejudices of his time. The fact that he set the play in Venice, where he had earlier explored issues of race, ethnicity and savage prejudice in The Merchant Of Venice, shows that he knew exactly what he was doing. In both, Shakespeare was forcing his audiences to engage in first a Jew and then a Moor as human beings as capable of intense, sympathetic feeling as they were. 

Its worth remembering that Othello is the first Black tragic hero in Anglophone theatre. It took 400 years before anyone else tried to do it – Eugene O’Neill with The Emperor Jones – and longer before great Black writers like James Baldwin and Lorraine Hansbury were able to tell their own stories and create their own black heroes and heroines. 

What is fascinating about Othello is how parallel it is to our own time.

Doing Othello now is especially resonant for all the reasons you say. Prior to starting rehearsals the Far Right riots were exploding across Britain. What is fascinating about Othello is how parallel it is to our own time. Venetian society is presented as thinking of itself as ‘post-racial’. Othello has risen to the top of society, he is a great general, the go-to in times of crisis; unlike Shylock he is widely admired and, when news of his marriage to Desdemona comes out, the Duke takes their side rather than that of Brabantio, who is deeply opposed to it on purely racial grounds. That is partly why we are setting it during the Bush/ Obama years, when Colin Powell and Obama himself were in similar positions to Othello at the start of the play.

But as with then, the veneer of post-racial sophistication conceals another reality: a deep seated prejudice and racism that bursts forth through Iago, infects the whole play and eventually leads to the deaths of Othello and Desdemona. While Trump’s election showed the backlash against Obama and the recent riots represent the resentment bubbling under the surface of the United Kingdom, Shakespeare was there first. He saw how these things played out, and although to my mind he looked forward to a post-racial society – why else would he see the destruction of Othello and Desdemona’s marriage and their deaths as a tragedy? – he also saw where the obstacles lay. 

This, for me, is why the play is still so important to do now. It is about universal humanity and how the prism of race obscures that to our peril. What could be a more compelling theme for our time?

Previous Elysium productions have included Athol Fugard’s The Island and Playland, both of which concern the politics of race in the context of apartheid or post-apartheid South Africa. Clearly the setting and historical context are different between these plays and Othello, but it also feels like there are resonances across the two, such as the ways in which Black characters must work both with and against white authority to survive. Do you see a similar continuity? How far did this inform Elysium’s decision to put on Othello next?

There’s an absolute continuity in our programming here. The issue of racial injustice and the struggle for equality, dignity and freedom is one that has threaded its way through Elysium’s programming. You see it in the plays you mention and also in the Covid19 Monologues we produced online. The decision to do Othello definitely grew out of this. It brought together two strands of our programming: the desire to produce classics, especially Shakespeare, and our desire to explore these issues of racial inequality. 

Othello is a fascinating text to explore in light of our history of producing plays dealing with Apartheid. Why? Because, of course, it was a play that could not be performed with Black and white actors in the roles of Othello and Desdemona until very late in the history of Apartheid South Africa. When John Kani played Othello in 1987 during the dying days of the regime, he was the first black South African to play the role opposite a white actress. The moment they kissed on stage was a historic, maybe even a revolutionary moment. Interracial sexual relationships were illegal under Apartheid, remember. Another example of how Shakespeare was ahead of his time.

Going back to Okri’s quote, we should surely not just limit the significance of Othello to how it speaks to issues of race, either today or in Shakespeare’s time. It was written as a compelling tragedy in its own right, and can still be so. One particular tension that underpins this – uniquely among Shakespeare’s tragedies, perhaps – is that although we are supposed to invest our sympathies in Othello as hero, it is Iago who has more stage time and whose puzzling motivations invite our wonder and thinking. What’s your take on this? Is Iago really the main interest of the play for you?

Well, this is the great conjuring trick of the play. By making Iago the centre in the first half he makes us complicit in what he does. We are caught up by him, seduced by his dazzling malevolence and extraordinary genius. Shakespeare is playing on our prejudices – conscious or unconscious – and makes us see the play through Iago’s eyes. In doing so he upends the moral landscape of the action: good becomes evil and evil becomes good.

But then as Iago casts his net over Othello and we see the desperate pain both he and Desdemona go through, Shakespeare sucker punches us. We realise that we are doing this to them, that Iago reflects something in us. Iago diminishes as Othello grows in stature and we feel his agony and Desdemona’s loss. The dark spell Iago has cast on the action is revealed for what it is: something ignoble, selfish and corrupt. The fact that Shakespeare makes Iago fall silent at the end, not giving us a reason for what he has done or any closure, forces us to take ownership of what we have been part of.

Too many productions, especially by white directors, get caught up in Iago and relegate Othello. This is an easy trap to fall into. But the play is Othello’s tragedy and, although it’s a fantastic duel between these two actors, any director doing their job must steer it in that direction. Capturing Othello’s greatness of soul – and Desdemona’s – is crucial.

Before you got to rehearsals you presumably re-read the play. Is there anything else that has stood out to you differently this time compared to previous encounters?

I’ve wanted to direct Othello since I first read it aged 16. I’m now a month away from my 53rd birthday, so that’s a lot of waiting and a lot of prep time. For the generation of directors before me – Sam Mendes, Katie Mitchell, Matthew Warchus etc. – directing Shakespeare was something they could do from their twenties. Previously, he was a staple. He isn’t now outside the RSC, the National and the Globe, so fewer and fewer directors are getting a chance to do his plays. It’s an honour and a privilege to finally be doing this one after all these years.

What has stood out differently? I suppose the absolute modernity of the play. More than ever it captures all the issues surrounding race of our time, but does so, not in a moralising, punitive or deterministic way, but an utterly humanist way. The dream of Desdemona and Othello’s marriage, that different races and ethnicities can come together through love, that wounds can healed and a common future can be forged in which we are all equal and understood through our humanity not our skin colour, is there in the play and its loss is the essence of the tragedy. At the same time, the forces of hostility towards that, which express themselves in even some of the better characters in the play (Emilia for instance), still stand ranged against it. Look at how Brabantio speaks about Othello to see what I mean.

As we struggle towards a post-racial society and against those who would inflict a race war on us, I can’t think of a better play to be doing.

So far we’ve been talking about the ways your production will revisit this play in light of new themes and historical contexts. But of course these questions also reveal our privilege, in that we have some prior experience against which we can compare this new production. Others, though, haven’t had that opportunity and may be encountering Shakespeare or Othello for the first time through your work. What would you say to someone who has never been to a Shakespeare play or thinks that it’s ‘not for me’?

Shakespeare is absolutely for you. Although the elites came to see his plays, he didn’t write them primarily for them, he wrote them for the people. Most of his audience – and we are talking about thousands of people each performance – couldn’t read or write, yet they stood for hours in the open air. They are thrillers, as powerful, gripping and visceral as a great movie or TV show. They grip and keep you on the edge of your seat – or they should. Along the way you will think and feel titanic thoughts and emotions and, done right, you should never forget them.

Our schools and communities project is called Shakespeare For All. That is what we sincerely believe, that Shakespeare is for all. Our mission, which we hold passionately, is to give Shakespeare back to the people, to give him to you. He is your playwright. He speaks your language, he speaks to you, he speaks about you. 

Come and see an enthralling piece of theatre you will never forget and fall in love with a playwright who, if you make a bond with him now, will be a friend for life.

Showing on the 20th & 21st September

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