For every action, there is a reaction. First, a long and pretty stellar list of black actors observe that they need to leave the country to stand a chance of being cast in roles suited to their talents. Off went David Harewood, Lennie James, Marianne Jean-Baptiste and David Oyelowo, to name a few. After the ying, the yang: in comes the brilliant, if pugnacious, actor and director Steven Berkoff. Down with all this political correctness, he says – as he asserts the right of white actors to play Othello. “To reserve, out of the hundreds of Shakespearean characters, the role of Othello for black people only is a form of racism in reverse and, to me, particularly obnoxious,” he wrote.
I hope he takes the role himself. Go ahead, Steven, knock yourself out. Play Desdemona as well, if you like – and, if the feminist police lock you up, I’ll visit. I can’t reasonably raise any barrier to you adapting or extending our appreciation of the play.
We’ve long argued that directors should be more willing to be creative in their casting decisions so as to provide better roles for minority actors. And there has been a bit of that. Idris Elba has spent the past few years as Luther, a black cop who wasn’t necessarily a black cop, in a role he secured through colourblind casting. Thus the character could just as easily have been played by a white actor. So, if Elba benefited on the one hand, there is nothing in principle to stop Berkoff playing Othello. As long as he can navigate the relevance to the plot of the character’s race without making the whole thing ridiculous.
But here’s the rub: don’t black up. That’s when it does start to seem ridiculous. Berkoff enjoyed watching a blacked-up Laurence Olivier play Othello in the 60s before the “fiends of political correctness” created a so-called “no-go zone for white actors on that particular role”. But that was of its time.
If the idea is to put a different spin on the play by challenging perceptions of the principal character, that’s one thing. But, when a white actor applies the shoe polish, all that says is that the character really should be black or Asian, but the director couldn’t find anyone good enough. And we know that isn’t true. Even that troupe of actors who have fled to the US have phones and email.
