Desdemona

In Shakespeare’s Othello, Desdemona is virtually a functional character: she is in the play to transgress by marrying a ‘Moor’ (i.e. a black man) and to become the object of her husband’s jealousy and murderous rage.  She is the device which brings about the ‘tragedy’.  Shakespeare makes her enough of a character, certainly, for us to think about her, care about her and watch in horror as her husband strangles her.  If you are unfamiliar with Shakespeare’s play, unfortunately much of this show will be lost.  After seeing the Paris production, Toni Morrison herself conceded that the show ‘would be more fulfilling for the viewer if she or he had read Othello.’

The show (I feel almost disrespectful using that word about this artwork) is a collaboration between Toni Morrison, best known as a Nobel Prize winning novelist, and Rokia Traoré, a singer and songwriter from Mali.  The two were put together by the director, Peter Sellars.  Ms Morrison and Ms Traorégo much further than a mere ‘gloss’ on Shakespeare’s ill-fated heroine.

Here, Desdemona is not only amplified into a rounded and assertive character, she is contrasted with her mother’s African maid, ‘Barbary’ (in Shakespeare’s text, ‘Barbara’ and mentioned only once as the source of the Willow song).  The form, however, in which this is conveyed is pared back to such apparent simplicity of presentation that words per se, weighted with significance, dominate.  The stage is almost bare except for a number of graves lined with bottles and other vessels – a Congolese custom, creating a site where the living may communicate with the dead.  (Of course, if you hadn’t read that somewhere, you’d have had no idea – an indication of Mr Sellars’ propensity for obscurity in the name of new interpretations of old texts.)  There is a huge translucent screen on which a translation from the Malian of Ms Traoré’s beautiful songs is projected.  The lighting design, by James F Ingalls, includes changing bands of white, blue and red lights behind this screen, as well as pools of light on the performers as the show proceeds.

Tina Benko – appropriately pale blonde and beautiful – is Desdemona.  She tells her story from beyond the grave – as she is, after all, dead – in a series of autobiographical monologues – not entirely imbued with self-knowledge, at least at first.  But as she is challenged and met and she learns of the realities of being a servant or, indeed, a black slave, she grows.  Ms Benko changes her voice skilfully to enact dialogues between herself and Othello, herself and Emilia, her maid, and between her mother and Barbary – as if she has internalised these key characters.  Ms Benko wears a simple, floor length white dress as does Ms Traoré – equally beautiful – and the ‘backing singers’ (they are more than that), Fatim Kouyaté and Marie Dembelé.  There are two male musicians, Mamah Diabaté and Toumani Kouyaté, also in white, who play Malian string instruments, the n’goni and the kora.  The music has that ambling gait of West Africa, underpinning the singer and the songs.  Ms Traoré is ‘Barbary’ – who reveals that her real name is Sa’ran – and the singer of songs that stand apart from Desdemona’s world, but comment on it obliquely, with a mix of yearning and questioning. 

The show arose out of a conversation between Ms Morrison and Mr Sellars.  He said he would never mount a production of Othello, though whether he thought it too simple or too unpleasant I don’t know.  Ms Morrison countered by saying she found the play ‘interesting’ – although quite clearly not for the usual reasons that people find Othello or Othello himself interesting.  Subsequently, Mr Sellars did mount a ‘controversial’ production of the play in Vienna.  And Ms Morrison developed the ways in which she found the play interesting.  One of these ways was the relationship between Shakespeare and Africa, between Desdemona and Barbary, the clear implication being that Desdemona was raised and sung to by an African woman (who reminds Desdemona in this show that she was a slave).  Ms Morrison picks up on such hints and runs with them.  Othello says (Act I, scene iii) ‘She loved me for the dangers I had passed, /And I loved her that she did pity them.’  Othello’s descriptions of these ‘dangers’ are evocative but cursory.  Ms Morrison expands and invents these ‘dangers’, giving them a disturbing contemporary ring, including an account of himself and Iago raping two old women in a barn…  Desdemona cannot forgive this, but says she can – or continues to – love.

The text, however, while often stunningly perceptive and confronting us with uncomfortable truths, also veers too frequently toward the didactic or even preachy – and at the expense of Ms Morrison’s usual insight as demonstrated in her novels.  Here she is deprived of her narrative voice: the characters must speak for themselves.  She has said that she is not ‘competing’ with Shakespeare, but that she had to find her own language, ‘worthy of the characters’.  Her success at this varies – at times, such as the debate between Barbary and Desdemona’s mother, blunt and brilliant; at other times, such as Desdemona claiming that her life was shaped by her choices and ‘it was mine’, it comes down to somewhat clunky assertion.  And making an ideological point can overwhelm subtlety.  When the question arises of why Othello believed Iago’s quite preposterous lies, the answer is ‘brotherhood’.  It’s a good, strong point – and a feminist one too – but it’s also too simple.  The relationship of Iago and Othello is more complex – as is Othello himself.  The very fact of Othello’s being black at the racist Venetian court brings about the necessity to play a flamboyant role, to create a ‘noble’ persona, making him immune to self-knowledge and vulnerable to Iago’s poison.

This is a presentation which has much of beauty and poetry, and much truth about these characters, their world and the wider implications.  Reception to previous productions has verged on awe, but for me, I must say, it feels vaguely pretentious – too high-mindedly ‘artistic’ as well as a bit of a Lehrstücke.  It runs far longer than it needs and is rarely dramatic in the sense of ideas emerging from the clash of motive and objective.  Lovely as are Ms Traoré’s songs and her gentle but unsettling music, I sometimes thought that I would rather read Ms Morrison’s text than see it performed.

Michael Brindley