Othello at the Market Theatre

Abstract

This article discusses the cultural work performed by Janet Suzman's 1987 production of Othello at the Market Theatre in Johannesburg: the first production to breach South Africa's colour-bar in casting black South African actor John Kani in the title role. Through an incorporation of reviews, a close reading of the playtexts, performance and reception history, literary criticism, and an awareness of the South African political and cultural context, the study situates Suzman's production in its specific historical moment, as well as considering its broader history in order to determine what it is about the production that merits the labels of 'radical' and 'ground-breaking' affixed to it by critics. In doing so, it shifts the focus from the production's multiracial casting and onto its treatment of women within the context of racial politics, positioning the white Desdemona's desire for the black Othello - arguably also present in Shakespeare's text - as the truly radical aspect of Suzman's production, in which racial difference is presented as the source of sexual power: a concept which finds parallels in the exchanges between Iago and Emilia and Roderigo and Bianca. The discussion of this neglected aspect of Suzman's radical production emphasizes the impact of social change on any production as well as on the reception of a black actor performing Othello: a performance which, in the case of Suzman's production, invites audiences to recognise the patriarchal societal forces which construct racism and oppression.

Blackface on the South African Stage

“…While Shakespearean studies in South Africa have for a long period (especially with the work of Martin Orkin [1987;Loomba and Orkin 2002]) critically discussed Shakespeare's place within colonial and postcolonial South Africa, one finds relatively few references to the use of blackface in his productions in these discussions. Many South African studies on Othello, of course, foreground the issue of race and (post-) colonial space or locality (South Africa), but it is only Seeff (2009) who mentions the 1 In the Introduction to the TDR/The Drama Review (Cole and Davis 2013, 10) special issue ("Routes of Blackface") her article on the Kaapse Klopse is summarised as follows: "Nadia Davids focuses on a very different instance of blackface minstrelsy in South Africa: the contemporary Cape Carnival. The form known in Afrikaans as klopse kamers originated as an emancipatory procession by the city's coloured population through colonial South Africa, and today it expresses a cultural dislocation wrought by slavery.…”