Walking in the footsteps of Paul Robeson's Othello
Patrice Natambama tells Terry Grimley about playing Othello in the shadow of Paul Robeson.
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It’s 50 years since Paul Robeson famously played Othello at Stratford and an exhibition about the American actor, singer and political activist is accompanying the RSC’s new production on tour.
So I asked Birmingham actor Patrice Naiambana, who is playing the role this time, is there a sense that Robeson’s shadow is falling across the new production?
Not at all, he says. But that doesn’t mean that he’s not a big admirer.
“We’re just getting on with it, putting on Othello. Nobody is thinking about Paul Robeson. But there’s an artist who did his best to stand for something that was outside the orbit of personal reputation.
“There’s a picture of him in the ‘Dirty Duck’, but somebody of that stature and commitment to freedom and civil rights, not just for his people in America, I would have thought they would have a room dedicated to him, a permanent commemoration of him, at the RSC.”
Naiambana, who made his RSC debut playing Aslan in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe ten years ago, is reunited in Othello with director Kathryn Hunter and movement director Marcello Magni, who gave him an important early break in Theatre de Complicite’s Robinson Crusoe reworking, Foe.
Hunter has chosen to set the production in the 50s.
“I suppose Kathryn is trying to find a natural home for the gender dynamics and some of the difference, outsider issues,” says Naiambana.
“It’s a similar era but slightly different from now. In the 50s women still had to know their place. Its glamour is another attraction.
“I remember talking to Kathryn some time ago about the relationship between men and war and the frustration and angst might bleed into their domestic lives.”
In fact, Naiambana’s take on the role shifts the focus from the usual one of racial difference to the particular issue of the military mind.
“It’s the story of an outsider who has become very revered in a country that he’s not from originally. He is certainly their best general. I’m interested in that situation, being exile-heritage myself, but in playing him and trying to chart his journey, I find he doesn’t actually say anything about it.
“The others have a lot to say about him. He’s called ‘The Moor’ so often, even by his wife. But actually he is just a military man who is extremely proud. Why does he set so much store by his military occupation? Why doesn’t he go fishing or have a butterfly collection?
“It’s all military honour and glorious war. The more I look at it, if he is isolated by power and sets so much store by his achievements, and those particular achievements are to do with war, how much is that creating a vulnerability in his soul that makes him particularly prone to the action he takes?
He thinks that if he has been cuckolded the people who look up to him will all laugh at him. He appears to be more upset about that than the fact that as a five-star general he’s had to run away to get married. When I first read the play I thought that was outrageous, but he doesn’t seem that bothered about it.”
Paul Robeson said that black actors shouldn’t set their limits at playing Othello, but should be aiming to play Hamlet and Lear.
In that context it seems rather pleasing that Patrice Naiambana played the Earl of Warwick for the RSC before Othello. But Robeson, he says, was speaking for his time and cultural reference points have shifted a long way since then.
“I don’t think this part should remain the province of black actors at all. Why can’t Othello be played by a white actor? Must Othello be blacked up? And for that matter, why not black up?
“And what is this thing about sequestering black actors? I don’t have much time for the debate, personally. I think black actors should be looking ever further afield because there are so many stories to be told of what I call shared history – of Patrice Lamumba, Kwame Nkrumah and Steve Biko, for example. I could go on and on.
“These are stories that have to be told, stories of intercultural dialogue, to make us more sophisticated. This is not black history, this is shared history.
“My father was born a British subject in Sierra Leone in 1922, my mother was from Bermuda and now I live in Birmingham. I come across people who taught English or worked for NGOs in Kenya. I’m talking about the 50s, 60s and 70s. So there’s a whole wealth of history of so-called outsiders. And then there’s inter-marriage. The point is that we are much further down the line than we acknowledge. I’m talking as an artist now – we’re much further down the line, so walls between cultures are much more porous than British mainstream theatre would allow.
“When we did the Histories in Stratford the blackest performers in terms of movement were people like Lex Shrapnel and Jonathan Slinger, because those guys are young and listen to hip hop. When we started rehearsing Richard III, I said to Jonathan, ‘you’re so charismatic, you remind me of a church in Brixton’.”
* Othello opens at Warwick Arts Centre on Friday and runs until February 7 (Box office: 024 7652 4524).
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