This rewriting of Shakespeare’s Othello was first performed at the National Theatre in Kampala in 1968, six years after Uganda gained independence from Britain. The play is set in a just re-opened theatre in England, where a white South African woman and a black Trinidadian man are rehearsing their parts of Desdemona and Othello. These two characters imagine when the theatre might last have had a performance, and go backwards in time, belting out Second World War songs, imitating the posturing of Oscar Wilde and finishing off with a trite Gilbert and Sullivan routine.
Here, the tawdry, dilapidated theatre, thick with dust, and the time-bound white voices, appear as a metaphor for the British Empire - a tired relic that the new free nations of Africa have cast aside. Cast aside but psychologically not freed themselves from, because the present-day love affair between the two actors is shaped, corrupted by the past.
These actors are given no names other than those of the Shakespeare characters they play, creating the unsettling sense that the two identities merge, their ‘real’ relationship a proxy for their stage relationship, or vice versa. And so it turns out: Othello’s dogged insistence that he and Desdemona radically reassess their roles in the play is a way for him to express the disquiet he feels over their off-stage relationship.
The bulk of the play involves the two actors rehearsing and re-rehearsing alone one scene from Shakespeare’s Othello, where Desdemona first tries to persuade Othello to re-instate the disgraced Cassio as his lieutenant while Othello tries to put her off: ‘Not now, sweet Desdemona, some other time’ (III.3.55). The director, described by Othello as an ‘an effete, English, intellectual idiot’, is meanwhile getting drunk down at the pub. The spent white male, then, has relinquished his control, leaving those who he has previously sought to master through racialized and gendered myths of inferiority to face their own demons and take charge of their own performance.
Desdemona wants to act her part in this scene with the traditional sweetness and gentleness attributed to her, but Othello refuses to play along with that interpretation, threatens even to walk out on the play unless Desdemona does it his way. ‘You must be all over me – sweet but commanding. Stifling’, says Othello, ‘This woman is determined to be on top’. Claiming that this is ‘the first play that was ever written about colour’, Othello insists that the sub-text of this play is that Desdemona wants Othello as ‘her personal black man. Hers, because he is black – he’s a slave’. Desdemona is ‘the first of the White Liberals – they tell themselves they are on the side of the black man [...] but what they really want is to tell them what to do [... ] they want power and they get it through love – because they are too sensitive to get it by force’.
Desdemona reluctantly agrees to play the scene as he wants, and rapidly plays the part of the cloying, domineering young white wife with great authenticity (there being an irony in Othello bullying and emotionally blackmailing her into agreeing to be domineering), until the scene rehearsal comes to an abrupt end when Othello cries ‘Devil’ and slaps her with ‘explosive vigour’. The stage directions indicate that it should not be made clear whether this was mimed or ‘real’. Of course, for an audience watching this play there is an additional level of representation, as they are watching actors pretending to be actors, miming an action that is to be an ambiguous gesture that might be mime or real.
But what are we witnessing on stage? How should we interpret it? Should the explosive vigour of this slap be celebrated as a black person no longer accepting his subjectivity to white hegemony in all its manipulative forms, or is what we are seeing the historically dominant male hitting a historically subordinate female, with this act a simultaneous doubling as both Shakespeare’s Othello slaps his Desdemona and Carlin’s postcolonial Othello slaps his girlfriend?
This moment, then, crystallizes a tension between feminist and postcolonial attempts to approach Othello. The fault-line between race and gender struggles is perhaps most neatly summed up by Djanet Sears in her own rewriting of Othello, Harlem Duet, where the Othello character’s resentful interpretation of the triumphs of Black feminism is that: ‘Black women wear the pants that Black men were prevented from wearing’.
The shocked response of Carlin’s Desdemona to Othello’s assault is to say that he has mixed up his scenes; the slap doesn’t come until Act 4, the violation – the disruption – of the linear path of the script adding a further revolutionary feel to the gesture. This marks a turning point in Not Now, Sweet Desdemona: since the slap is not scripted at that point, it has a reality outside of Shakespeare’s play, whether it is mimed or not. It acts as an aural full stop, ending the masquerade that the actors’ performance is separate and does not relate to the hurt that plagues their own lives. When the characters speak again it is as themselves and about themselves, and they symbolize this by her removing her wig and him his turban.
Othello apologizes, but he and Desdemona share the realization that his rage has a more intimate source than that of the play. As they speak honestly about their own relationship, they confess what drew them to each other: the white, pampered daughter of a wealthy South-African businessman and the African-Caribbean man whose ancestors were enslaved. Desdemona says the appeal was to go to bed with a savage, ‘a devil’; Othello admits he got a kick out of having a white woman, whose backside was as white as an angel’s. They face the fact that what first sexually attracted them to each other were the racist myths they both abhor and that their relationship went flat when, as Othello says,
‘Our bodies stopped being strange and became real’.
But the play ends with hope: this modern Othello and Desdemona are not locked into a nightmare of violence and mis-recognition, as their tragic namesakes are, that will end only with their deaths. Their determination to confront their own illusions and prejudices allows them to break through the deadlock in their relationship and discover that they can actually love and desire each other, not for what one symbolises to the other, but for themselves.
Not Now, Sweet Desdemona: a duologue for Black and White Within the Realm of Shakespeare' s Othello by Murray Carlin (Oxford University Press, 1969).
