BARD BREAKS OUT
BLIND casting has been setting tongues wagging in the UK. The Golden Globe in London opened its summer season with Hamlet and As You Like it with men playing women, women playing men.
This brought debate and a flurry of programmes on BBC TV. Many artists take issue with the concept of blind casting, seeing it is as patronising and frequently racist.
Oops, we must toss in people of colour, mix up gender/so-called race/physical disability to make it demographically more equitable. Is there a point to the casting? If it is tokenism, no thanks.
In Cape Town we are way ahead of the binary curve of blind casting, with artists actively using casting to interrogate gender/sexuality/colour.
We saw this in June with the premiere of a ground-breaking adaption of Shakespeare’s Othello – with an all-women cast, set in a contemporary female prison.
The casting is used to amplify relationships in the play and to tie in with the locale of a female prison where one could imagine an Othello and her cohorts ruling the roost.
After its maiden run at the Galloway Theatre and Drama Factory, the production is on at the Baxter’s Masambe Theatre from September 4 to 12.
The female cast don’t play the characters as the Bard wrote them in terms of gender. Othello (Annitha Judith Kontyo) is a woman. She isn’t called Othellolina or feminised. Iago (Regina R Malan) is like an Annie Lennox peroxided rock star strutting around in her purple jump suit. These women are conniving and back-stabbing. There are moments of sisterhood, tenderness and zen, but whoa – hold on to your seats as they slap each other around.
We forget the theatrical device of a woman playing a man and instead it becomes the fact that Iago is a schemer shyster.
In the first half, I felt the cast were seeing themselves as playing the Bard’s Othello. It lagged and some of the less-experienced artists mumbled lines. There were some walk-outs.
In the second half it became a prison story. A screaming ovation followed. Malan said that, for the Baxter Masambe season, the first half has been tightened and the dialogue worked on.
The cast of eight remains with Malan co-directing with Adolph de Beer. The other artists are Candice Burgess, Leku Dube-Rudling, Lizanne Peters, Nathasha Futeran, Marine George and Tara Dominique Macpherson.
Malan, dripping in glee and malice, is an Iago not to be messed with as she paces the cage-like set which is more like an installation (designed by Stephan Fourie from Curated Event Concepts). A revelation is Dube-Rudling as Cassio, who wrestles, literally, with Iago. Magnificent performance.
Burgess as the ethereal Desdemona is a foil against the brute physicality of her prison sisters but she ain’t no innocent. Futeran as the prison guard is predatory – and with chilling precision conveys the way people in institutions are preyed on by their minders.
Regarding the prison context, Malan reflected: “This comes down to the human condition and mental states that people battle with on a daily basis, such as jealousy, power struggles, lust, deception and racism.
“This is why the prison is such a great setting – it allows one to showcase the depths people will go to under extenuating circumstances. A prison is a metaphor for also being mentally trapped.”
I love the purple jumpsuits the women wear – not the usual orange we tend to associate with prison garb. Yeah, purple is the new orange.
Malan told me: “It is the year of purple. That’s why we chose it. The Pantone Colour of the Year is purple. The purple also ties in with the LGBTQ theme.”
Pantone is the US colour forecasting company which sets the so-called colour standard of colour which is widely accepted by industries using colour. The purple of 2018 is Pantone 18-3838 Ultra Violet, which Pantone says “communicates originality, ingenuity, and visionary thinking that points us toward the future”.
On the issue of blind casting, initially Malan and De Beer set about casting Othello as a person of colour in line with the Bard’s frame of Othello being a Moor – a person from Africa, an “other”. In the casting process, Dube-Rudling and Lizanne Peters excelled. Malan and De Beer were blown away.
They got the parts because they were right and deliver knock-out performances. This drives the point home that casting is not blind.
Here is a company that set out to do an all-female Othello – staying with Shakespeare’s positioning of Othello as a person of colour – within a pale-faced grid. That construct shifted in rehearsal and makes sense in terms of a demographic of a prison where one would encounter women who come from mixed backgrounds.
The characterisation is superb, from peroxided Iago to dreadlocked Cassio to Desdemona, who looks as if she has just stepped out after having her hair done at Constantia Village.
Exciting, innovative and thrilling theatre. Get there.
Othello: A Woman’s Story is on from September 4 to 12, at 7.30pm, at the Baxter Masambe Theatre. Tickets are R150. Discounted seats R95 for students and seniors; R85 schools. R110 for block bookings (10 or more tickets). Book at www. webtickets.co.za or at the Baxter. For your chance to win tickets, see the freebies column on page 11.