“A tragedy of racial conflict” was how Paul Robeson summed up Othello as he rehearsed the play in London. The only black actor previously to have attempted it was Ira Aldridge. In 1825, the pro-slavery lobby had closed his production and the Times’s critic had written: “Owing to the shape of his lips it is utterly impossible for him to pronounce English.” No wonder it took almost a century for another black actor to brave the part.
The son of a runaway slave, Robeson was, by 1930, an international star: a lawyer, athlete, academic, singer, actor and campaigner. In 1928 he had captured London’s heart with a sell-out performance singing Ol’ Man River in the barnstorming, barrier-breaking musical Show Boat. He jumped at the chance to tackle Othello.
His Desdemona was Peggy Ashcroft – at 23 already a name to watch. But the production was hampered by its producer, Maurice Browne, who cast himself as Iago and drafted in his wife, Ellen van Volkenburg, to direct. Ashcroft later called her “a pretentious dud”. Browne commissioned a set so fussy that, as the Sunday Times’s James Agate raged, “the noise of its erection ruined three separate scenes”. Only Robeson and Sybil Thorndike, as Emilia, could shout loud enough to be heard over the din.
Agate cringed in the stalls as Browne “trotted through the play like… some schoolboy whipping a top, some incommensurate gnat” and “shockingly manhandled” the text. For the Observer’s Ivor Brown, the miscasting skewed the whole production; next to Robeson’s “ebon Othello… an oak… a superb giant of the woods for the great hurricane of tragedy to whisper through, then rage upon, then break”, Browne’s Iago was “a gimlet”.
Other critics also dwelled on Robeson’s physical presence, but not always positively. The Daily News’s EA Baughan felt that Robeson’s “dignity is more the effect of his massive frame than the expression of a big and noble soul”, while Agate, who thought every Othello had to possess a “fine physique”, wrote: “In the physical aspect Mr Robeson largely failed. Though in the mere matter of inches he towered above everybody else, it was a tower which cringed. He walked with a stoop, his body sagged, his hands appeared to hang below his knees.” He put it down to “the inferiority complex”, but his criticisms also stemmed from his central point that “there is no more reason to choose a negro to play Othello than to requisition a fat man for Falstaff”.
Writing in the Daily Telegraph, WA Darlington felt that Robeson was a “really memorable” Othello precisely because he was black: “By reason of his race Mr Robeson is able to surmount the difficulties which English actors generally find in the part.” While other Othellos had seemed illogically jealous, Robeson’s jealousy seemed real, because: “Mr Robeson… comes of a race whose characteristic is to keep control of its passions only to a point, and after that point to throw control to the winds.” It was a “fine” performance and “the much-debated question whether Shakespeare meant Othello to be a negro or an Arab can be left to the professors”. Baughan, in contrast, stated baldly: “I agree with Coleridge that Othello must not be conceived as a negro, but as a high and chivalrous Moorish chief.”
Only the Express’s critic seemed to think the casting of a black actor was a historic event. He reported overhearing people saying “Why should a black actor be allowed to kiss a white actress?” and his review, subtitled “Coloured Audience in the Stalls”, concluded that Robeson had “triumphed as a negro Moor, black, swarthy, muscular, a real man of deep colour”.
Recognising that his Othello transcended the ropey production, the audience gave Robeson 20 curtain calls. He reprised the role all over the world and never lost his pleasure in it. For Robeson, it was more than just a part: it was, as he once said, “killing two birds with one stone. I’m acting and I’m talking for the negroes in the way only Shakespeare can.”
Peggy Ashcroft and Paul Robeson in Othello in 1930.
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https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2003/sep/03/theatre