For the first time in its nineteen year history, Vancouver’s Bard on the Beach festival is to include a production of Othello, having lined up black Canadian actor Michael Blake to play the role.

“It’s been an omission, no question,” says festival artistic director Christopher Gaze. “But I don’t think it got away from us, it’s purely been a question of finding the right actor. … There just aren’t enough black actors here in Vancouver,” he adds. “And to be able to play a part of this measure – if you’re black or of an ethnicity that would work – like any other part, you have to win it. This is a massive role – in scope and emotion – it’s very difficult.”

Ray Fearon as Othello

The greatest tragedy is that no black actors in the West of Canada have been considered good enough to play the role up to now, even if the role is considered one of the toughest in the repertoire.  Having played Othello with the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford-upon-Avon, British actor Ray Fearon commented:

People say Iago is the better role. But Othello is mammoth emotionally. I tell you, it finished me off. It demolished me physically. I had to have two months off afterwards and I grew up as a damn athlete!

Fearon’s performance was something of a watershed. Only ten years ago he became the first black actor to play the role in the main theatre at Stratford (although Ben Kingsley played the role without makeup as an Arab in 1985). Donald Sinden was the last white actor to perform the part in ‘blackface’ for the RSC in 1978.

Olivier: "My kingdom for a banjo!"

Even if one accepts the defeatist view that decent black Shakespearean actors are as rare as hens’ teeth, can it really ever be the best option to leave such a major play out of the repertoire? The theatre has always been a place where masks and disguises are worn and the audience is asked to suspend disbelief, particularly in Shakespeare’s plays. Many of his works originally featured men dressed as women dressed as men. There is no controversy when Shylock is played by a gentile, when Lear is played by a young man or, indeed, when black actors play Hamlet or Kings of England.

Clearly, casting the role of Othello causes more of a problem, as Othello’s racial difference inspires much of the fierce invective spoken by Iago and the rest of the supporting cast.  Perhaps the cleverest solution, was a 1997 production in Washington, D.C., in which Patrick Stewart played Othello with an otherwise entirely black cast. However, it is surely possible to find inventive solutions to the problem of how to allow a white man to play the role of a ‘moor’ without resorting to stereotypes and caricatures which have typified some of the famous performances of the last century (a New York Times critic said of Olivier’s film performance that :“You almost wait for him to whip a banjo out or start banging a tambourine.”)

If there is a moral to this story, it is surely that more black actors need to be seen major Shakespearean roles, but the let’s hope that this can be achieved without typecasting. Black actors don’t need to be confined to having Othello as their only opportunity at a leading Shakespearean role any more than Jewish actors would appreciate only playing Shylock, or Scottish actors being limited to Macbeth. Similarly, the theatre will suffer if, for reasons of political correctness totally inconsistent with the flexibility associated with casting other Shakespearean roles, Othello becomes the exclusive property of black actors.