Worlds Elsewhere (57 page)

YET MAYBE THERE WAS A DIFFERENT STORY
to be told about the connection between Shakespeare and apartheid: not in prison cells on Robben Island, necessarily, but in university seminar rooms and theatres across South Africa.

Browsing one lunchtime in a second-hand bookshop, I came across a slim lilac paperback. Its title was
Shakespeare Against Apartheid,
and it was by Martin Orkin, an academic who'd taught at Wits. It had been published in 1987, a period when revolts against the hard-line P. W. Botha administration were at their height and yet another nationwide state of emergency had been declared. Many feared South Africa might tumble into outright civil war.

Various people had told me about
Shakespeare Against Apartheid.
Over lunch, I read it. The book was absorbing, hectoring, optimistic, doom-mongering and persuasive by turns. It was aimed at (predominantly white) South African undergraduates who had passed through an apartheid education system still dominated by the teachings of liberal humanists such as A. C. Bradley and the New Critics of the 1940s and 1950s. Its aim was insurrection by stealth.

Orkin argued that it wasn't true (as those critics had claimed) that the Almighty Bard was above the rough-and-tumble of contemporary politics; to believe so was to close one's eyes to the injustices and violence raging all around. Instead, Shakespeare could – should – be employed in the here and now. American new historicists and Marxist-influenced British cultural materialists had become increasingly fascinated by the political contradictions and pressures that shaped Shakespeare's
working life: intrigues at court, of censorship, the devastating divisions of the Reformation. Orkin argued that it was high time South African teachers did the same.

Leading by example, Orkin attempted to introduce Shakespeare to the pressure cooker of 1980s South Africa: a pariah state of suspicious deaths and torture in custody, a racist judiciary, an army flagrantly out of control. An essay on
Hamlet
linked King Claudius's attempts to dispose of the hero – sending him to England in the company of assassins, then arranging a suicidal duel with Laertes – with the death in September 1977 of the black activist Steve Biko, who had been stripped and beaten in a police cell. Instead of dwelling on hoary debates such as why Hamlet delays his revenge (Bradley diagnosed a case of ‘profound melancholy'), Orkin suggested the Prince was already manning the township barricades:

Later in the book, I was caught by the presence of a play that Ahmed Kathrada had mentioned, and which I felt had been eluding me until now:
Othello.
Taking his cue from Solomon Plaatje's suggestion that ‘Shakespeare's dramas … show that nobility and valour, like depravity and cowardice, are not the monopoly of any one colour', Orkin outlined the hypocrisy of denying that the play's essential subject was race. In contemporary South Africa, it could not be about anything else. Furthermore, he bore down on a long and dishonourable line of white critics who had sought to resolve the ‘problem' of how a black African Othello married a white woman in the first place. Samuel Taylor Coleridge had notoriously asserted that ‘it would be something monstrous to conceive this beautiful Venetian girl with a veritable negro', but this was merely the start. Squadrons of commentators had been drawn to the issue, attempting to reconcile their own deep-held prejudices about people of colour with the issues thrown up by the play.

When it came out,
Shakespeare Against Apartheid
was pungently controversial, decried as well as worshipped, but it did something
crucial – insist that Shakespeare might indeed have something to say about how things really were in South Africa.

I thought back to Solomon Plaatje's renaming of Shakespeare as ‘William Shake-the-Sword'. At the time, it had struck me as an erudite, slightly ironic joke. Maybe it was also a call to arms.

Othello
had played its own highly particular role in the politics of race in South Africa. The tragedy had a long history in these parts – perhaps, I was surprised to learn, the longest of any Shakespeare play on the African continent. The first recorded performance dated back to the early nineteenth century, less than two decades after any of Shakespeare's work had first been acted in Africa and only twenty-four years after British forces seized the Cape from the Dutch. A hardy band of ‘a gentleman and three ladies from the Theatre Royal Liverpool' arrived in the garrison of Cape Town in the spring of 1818 and quickly joined forces with a local amateur stock company.

On 24 October, a newspaper announced that ‘under the sanction of His Excellency, The Governor … This Evening the amateur company will perform the
Tragedy of Othello
with the musical farce
The Poor Soldier.'
The combination of main-course tragedy with a farce or comic opera for dessert (this one by the Irish playwright John O'Keeffe) was entirely standard in the period, and, as I had discovered in California, would last happily for decades yet. Try as I might, though, I could find out no more of this Liverpudlian attempt on Shakespeare's play, or whether the ‘gentleman' played Othello or Iago (my guess was the latter, it usually being regarded the better role).

In 1829, another visiting Englishman, H. Booth, gave what the
Cape Commercial Advertiser
regarded as a ‘judicious and effective performance' in the lead, offering extracts alongside
Romeo and Juliet
and
Richard III.
Other
Othellos
followed in 1831 and 1833. In 1834 an amateur company attempted it once again, their lead actor praised for his ‘dignity and feeling' in ‘several of the most trying scenes'.

As I read about these early performances, one thing struck me: that no one seems to have an inkling that the racial politics of Shakespeare's play had anything to do with those of the emerging South Africa. From scant paragraphs in a few newspapers, it wasn't clear whether this was wilful blindness or a fact so obvious it barely
needed repeating. Whatever the truth,
Othello
became one of the most popular Shakespeare plays in the colony.

In 1836, yet another new version appeared, translated into Cape Dutch. This time there is no mistaking its intentions: the title was
Othello, of de Jaloersche Zwart
(‘Othello, or the Jealous Black') and was perhaps based on a popular – and shamelessly racist – parody that had circulated in the Netherlands. Judging from a letter sent to the
Commercial Advertiser,
the show provoked strong feelings among audiences. The correspondent fulminated:

The language was straight out of the English sixteenth century, or the American seventeenth: zealots like Philip Stubbes and Stephen Gosson were forever railing against the pestiferous iniquities of stage-players. (Stubbes's own formulation was that plays were incitements to ‘idleness, unthriftiness, whoredom, wantonness, drunkenness, and what not', which sounded pretty good to me.)

But in this talk of ‘passions' and ‘grossness' the issue took on a nasty new topicality whose origins were not hard to intuit. Slavery had been abolished on the Cape two years before, in 1834, a fact that left many bitter that their ‘property' was being taken away by a remote and lordly British government. That black characters should appear on stage was not merely damnably un-Christian – it was a damned insult.

Productions of
Othello
kept coming – ‘the defining dramatic expression of South African society in the Shakespearian canon', in the words of Rohan Quince, an authority on South African theatre history. Another version was staged courtesy of a Dutch society in 1837, this time with Iago played by ‘a Gentleman lately arrived from India' (European, it is fair to assume); then again in 1842, remade as an ‘operatic burlesque' with men playing both Othello and Desdemona (again, both white). Here the play's racial context was acknowledged, albeit for laughs – Mr Macdonald's Desdemona won applause for his ‘little endearments towards his black “hobby” [husband]'. Iago was
reportedly played as a buffoonish Irishman, another kind of racial slur. The show was riotously popular.

What lies behind the rib-nudging tone of these accounts becomes clearer when the celebrated Victorian actor Gustavus V. Brooke visited Cape Town in 1854. A scheduled performance of Bulwer-Lytton's
The Lady of Lyons
was quickly replaced with
Othello,
because, the advertisement read:

The tone was larksome – a
coloured
man who marries a
white
woman! – but it nonetheless signalled a hardening of attitudes.

In the twentieth century, real life would make a nonsense of anything that Shakespeare depicted on stage. The beginning of the apartheid era is conventionally dated to 1948 and the victory of the National Party, but the word
apartheid
(‘separateness') was first used by Afrikaner racial theorists as early as the late 1920s.

One landmark piece of legislation was the first incarnation of the Immorality Act (1927), outlawing ‘extramarital carnal intercourse … between whites and [black] Africans'. This was later enlarged to cover all sexual relations, married or otherwise, between whites and any other race.
Othello
's subject matter – with its depiction of a marriage between a black man and a white woman – became, in effect, illegal. The play was never officially banned, but was increasingly regarded as too controversial to stage or even teach. In Port Elizabeth in 1962, it was removed from high-school courses.

The Population Registration Act of 1950 divided South Africans into three racial groups, in steeply descending order: white, coloured and black (‘Bantu'), with a fourth category, Indian, added later. ‘Coloured' designated someone who was mixed-race, usually descended from Europeans who had had relationships with black Africans or slaves, but in practice the term was notoriously imprecise, applied to anyone who didn't look ‘white' enough. Under the Separate Amenities Act of 1953, theatres were segregated. This legislation was further toughened by the various Group Areas Acts and regulations imposed in 1965, which stipulated that ‘no racially disqualified person may attend any place of
public entertainment' – outlawing both mixed audiences and mixed casts, not to mention mixed sport, music or any other cultural activity.

Although during apartheid the majority of Shakespeare performances were played by white actors in front of white audiences (even, on rare occasions,
Othello
), courtesy of politically conscious performers Shakespeare began to become involved with the struggle. As was the case in communist Eastern Europe, one attraction was that subversive political messages could be smuggled into ostensibly uncontroversial texts – almost impossible for the authorities to object if the script was by the deadest of dead white males. It is an irony worth enjoying that some of the strongest Shakespearian responses to apartheid were staged by Afrikaans-speaking directors and actors in state-funded, whites-only venues.

One of the most mischievous was the German-born director Dieter Reible, who in 1970 broke the newly initiated cultural boycott to work in South Africa. Reible's Afrikaans production of
Titus Andronicus
was set in a fascist Roman state with clear contemporary echoes, and lingered – to the obvious discomfort of some critics – on the passionate love affair between Queen Tamora of the Goths and the black character Aaron. The following year, Reible used
King Lear
to go even further. Although the rules required the actors to be ethnically white, Reible made liberal use of make-up and set the play in something resembling a Zulu or Xhosa village, knowing full well that President Fouché would attend the premiere. Incensed, one paper suggested that Reible should apologise for this grave affront to the president's dignity (and that of his wife).

Another Afrikaans-speaker, the playwright André Brink, made grim comedy out of apartheid with a 1971 version of
The Comedy of Errors
called
Kinkels innie Kabel
(‘Twists in the Cable'), set in a fishing village on the Cape. Cleverly using Shakespeare's twins to poke fun at the ludicrous divisions of the system, it featured a skit on the fact that in real life South Africa had recently dispatched not one but two candidates to the Miss World competition (‘Miss South Africa' and ‘Miss Africa South'). After a performance by all-white performers, the play was staged in the comparative freedom of Cape Town's Little Theatre, with a racially mixed cast in front of integrated audiences.

But it was
Othello
that provoked one of the most thoughtful critiques of apartheid. In the same year, 1971, the British playwright Donald Howarth moved to South Africa, setting himself up in a tiny
flat in Hillbrow. Horrified by the death of the activist Ahmed Timol, murdered in police custody that October (officers claimed Timol had voluntarily thrown himself out of a tenth-floor window), Howarth wrote a play called
Othello Slegs Blankes
(‘Othello Whites Only'), its title referencing the signs plastered on everything from drinking fountains to beaches. Although the script was never intended to be staged, the playwright was persuaded to put it on at the newly opened Cape Town Space in June 1972.