Chris Thurman: Othello reclaims his language, gods and heritage in Foot’s reimagining

Atandwa Kani has been saying all the appropriate things when interviewed about his role in a landmark new production of Othello. For example, pressed to comment on what it is like having a world-famous actor as his dad — Is it difficult to be known as “John Kani’s son”? — he has been firm, diplomatic and poignant: “Absolutely not. He is my father, he has taught me how to be a man, how to explore love, to embrace responsibility. I’ve chosen acting but he’s still my biggest supporter. I don’t take him as this great hero; the world does, and rightly so, but first and foremost he’s my father. There’s no pressure, only love.”

Yet when I chat to Kani junior over the phone, knowing that I share many of his views about Shakespeare, he lets slip a few thoughts that, he admits, “I probably shouldn’t say”. This production of Othello is not one for those unfortunate souls who think of themselves as Shakespearean purists: “We came to this play knowing that the original text does not suit us, and we have to do it our own way. That was the starting-off point.”

Shakespeare’s tale of the Moor of Venice, the black man in a white society whose insecurities and predilections make him an easy target for the villain Iago — a man who is easily duped into sexual jealousy and ultimately the murder of his wife Desdemona — simply “wouldn’t suffice” for this production, says Kani, because “it doesn’t do justice to us as black people”.

Director Lara Foot has rewritten various aspects of the play and, more significantly, has found or commissioned translators to produce a multilingual text that features isiXhosa and Afrikaans (and even snatches of German) alongside the original early modern English.

Artists have been adapting Shakespeare for four centuries, so the notion that there is a “correct” way to stage his plays seems rather absurd. Still, many people cling to this idea. Kani has a neat retort: “Shakespeare’s been dead for so long. We don’t have to secure the rights to put his work on stage, so why do we need the right to alter it? I don’t really care. I’m not going to conform to the way in which Shakespeare is put on a pedestal. It’s only a colonised artistic imagination that considers Shakespeare as primary or quintessential and everything else, or everyone else, as secondary.”

This doesn’t mean that Kani has some Freudian impulse to kill off of his precursors or to deride the Shakespeare tradition that has come before him. Not least because that tradition has always included artists using Shakespeare to challenge authority, to make inroads into narrow-minded norms and conservative sensibilities. In particular, of course, there is the case of his father playing Othello in a celebrated production directed by Janet Suzman at the Market Theatre in 1987.

“In the apartheid context, when people were fighting for emancipation and basic human rights, staging Othello made sense as a form of protest,” observes Kani. “Today, it’s about representation. So we need to do it differently, to give Othello his own language back. Give him his gods, his heritage, his culture back. He must stand as a man, not as a caricature where his blackness makes him animalistic and dangerous.”

I mention that American Shakespeare scholar Ayanna Thompson calls herself “the Othello whisperer” after her numerous experiences of consulting with black actors who have been told that playing the part will be a highlight of their career, until they discover in performance that Shakespeare stacks the odds against them, luring the audience into complicity with the charismatic Iago. The moral of Thompson’s story is: as a play, Othello is structurally and irredeemably racist.

Kani, who has been based in the US for a number of years, agrees that the risk of Shakespeare’s play reinforcing rather than subverting racism is particularly acute given that country’s history and, in many parts, its present practice of insisting on “keeping the black figure marginalised, an outsider”. But what about our past and present here in Africa?

This production was first developed for the Düsseldorf Schauspielhaus in 2022, where it challenged German audiences to reflect on their country’s history as a colonial power, the “Second Reich” that established German South West Africa (present-day Namibia) and perpetrated a genocide against the Herero and Nama people. It imagines Othello as an orphan who grew up in the Eastern Cape but was adopted by German missionaries before climbing the ranks of the imperial army. He is sent back to Africa to put down a “native revolt”.

This premise is a generative one. It creates an evocative setting that is vividly conjured in Gerhard Marx’s remarkable set and costume design. Within this setting, its multilingualism helps to complicate our sense of what is “South African”. The Afrikaans spoken by Iago (Albert Pretorius) crossed the border of the Orange River long ago, and it is not too much of a stretch to imagine an isiXhosa-speaking Emilia (Faniswa Yisa), handmaid to Desdemona (Carla Smith).

But perhaps most importantly, the colonial setting transposes Othello’s self-hatred closer to home. Othello ultimately recognises that, in killing the forces of the “turban’d Turk” — racial and religious other to the white Christian European — he has been defending the interests of Venice by attacking his own identity. In an African context, this can be interpreted as the core Fanonian dilemma: Othello, Kani notes, “has been taught to see his own blackness as something that is bad, evil. The message of Frantz Fanon and later proponents of Black Consciousness is that the black man has become enslaved by inferiority, the white man by superiority. They are mutually dependent and both neurotic.”

Fanon’s is one of numerous voices interpolated by Foot into the text of Othello. It’s an insertion that is made possible by the freedom granted to theatre makers staging Shakespeare in translation. Once you accept that we are always “translating” when we engage with Shakespeare (even from his English to our English), translation into other languages is no longer a contrivance. And if one is not aiming for absolute fidelity through translation — that is, not trying to “reproduce” Shakespeare — then there is scope to make other changes.

“We took this as a spur to change what is said, not just the language in which it is said,” explains Kani. “There’s no point in simply reinforcing the text’s racism in the translation. Instead, we had a chance to fix aspects of the play that misrepresent blackness.”

Still, translation isn’t easy. Kani was excited but intimidated by the prospect of “recuperating the full poetic potential of a language like isiXhosa”.

“When I got the call from Lara, I had an immediate panic attack. The problem is the poetry. We had a four-person isiXhosa collective wrestling with the heightened English text, translating not just what’s on the page, but in Othello’s heart.”

The result is an Othello who is “dissected from the perspective of blackness — we’re trying to understand him from the inside, not from the outside, as Shakespeare was. It’s about his dreams, his fears, his prayers … and ours too!”

• Othello is at the Baxter Theatre until May 4.