Predictably, a student production of Othello was scrapped last week at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario—because a white girl was to play the lead. Othello the Moor, the ill-fated hero of Shakespeare’s tragedy, is a black man in the text and, since the middle of the last century at least, on the stage as well.
Director Maggie Purdon, a student, told the Canadian National Post her intention was a feminist adaptation of sorts, “It would be more of an issue of sexuality, and the issue would be that Othello’s sexuality makes him an outsider.” But in a Facebook post on Thursday, just four weeks from her opening night, Purdon called the whole thing off and broadly apologized for her casting choice, “a problematic decision that caused people within this community to feel oppressed, and for that we are greatly sorry.”
Really, come to think of it, how could a campus Othello in the age of the microaggression ever not be doomed?
Textually alone, you’ve already got mention of the Moor’s “thick lips” and reference to his “blackness” intermingled with shades of damnation. (Recall Emilia’s cry, upon learning Othello’s slain his wife, “You are the blacker devil!”) Othello and Desdemona’s sex life comes up in conversation with villain Iago—to the bawdy delight of Elizabethan audiences probably, and American high school students assuredly.
Then there’s the idea, per the evil imperialist critics of yore (dead white guys all), that Othello’s impulsivity dooms him. More acceptably it’s his trusting nature that does him in, his faith in Iago’s decency, and Cassio and Desdemona’s, that gets tragically twisted by an amplified awareness of his own outsider status. Being the only black man in a white land, the Moor of Venice gets his guard up against betrayal—but too intensely and much too late.
Claiming the tragedy’s independence from the race question is no less thorny and awkward than insisting on its racial determinism. Or so goes the lesson of these Canadian kids’ wasted work.
Controversial Othello casting is nothing new of course. 1943 saw Paul Robeson Broadway’s first black Othello, only to be followed by Laurence Olivier’s blackface Othello in the 1960s. In 1997 Patrick Stewart played Othello against an otherwise all-black cast. In 1998, Hugh Quarshie declared no self-respecting black actor should consent to the demeaning role again—although, since then, plenty have. And in 2011, a German production cast a female Othello against an all-male cast, but she wore a gorilla costume.
Plus, brushing aside for a moment the thick web of warring intersectional identities, each one wounded in its own way, the students’ casting choice kind of makes sense. The student directors did not respond to my questions about their casting calls. But if their late September auditions for Othello were not dramatically more diverse than the city of Kingston or the Queen’s campus itself, making Othello’s “difference” sex rather than race might have come down to a simple matter of convenience.
