Shakespeare's Others in 21st-century European Performance

The Merchant of Venice and Othello

Boika Sokolova, Janice Valls-Russell, Boika Sokolova, Janice Valls-Russell, David Schalkwyk, Silvia Bigliazzi

• Publisher: The Arden Shakespeare
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781350260795
• eBook ISBN: 9781350125964
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism of Shakespeare

The Merchant of Venice and Othello are the two Shakespeare plays which serve as touchstones for contemporary understandings and responses to notions of 'the stranger' and 'the other'. This groundbreaking collection explores the dissemination of the two plays through Europe in the first two decades of the 21st-century, tracing how productions and interpretations have reflected the changing conditions and attitudes locally and nationally. Packed with case studies of productions of each play in different countries, the volume opens vistas on the continent's turbulent history marked by the instability of allegiances and boundaries, and shifting senses of identity in a context of war, decolonization and migration. Chapters examine productions in Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Italy, France, Portugal and Germany to shed light on wide-scale European developments for the first time in English. In a final section, performance insights are offered by interviews with three directors: Karin Coonrod on directing The Merchant in Venice at the Venetian Ghetto in 2016, Plamen Markov on his 2020 Othello for the Varna Theatre (Bulgaria) and Arnaud Churin, whose Othello toured France in 2019. In drawing attention to the ways in which historical circumstances and collective memory shape and refashion performance, Shakespeare's Others in 21st-century European Performance offers a rich review of European theatrical engagements with Otherness in the productions of these two plays.

PART ONE

Relocating otherness

The Other-within

Induction 1

Lawrence Guntner

The stagings of Shakespeare’s Venetian plays discussed in Part One (Relocating otherness: The Other-within) probe the question of otherness within national European contexts: Italy, Bulgaria, Poland, Serbia and France. The theatre practitioners presented here liberate and redefine these received narratives to examine and challenge hegemonies, whether linguistic, religious, ethnic or ideological, which serve to silence singularities, assimilate them or relegate them to the margins in a variety of ways. Their strategies involve commissioning new translations and radical adaptations which contest official vernaculars with regional languages, relocating the action to contemporary settings, restructuring the dramaturgy of the plays through the replacement of dialogue with narrators and commentators, foregrounding minor characters and sometimes directly challenging Shakespeare’s text for deficiencies, or intervening in its integrity and coherence – all techniques associated with post-dramatic theatre. Though not all of them can be brought under this heading, re-envisioning otherness in Shakespeare performance has meant politicizing Shakespeare. And while race, as skin pigmentation, has become the volatile marker for the Other throughout Europe, Othello’s skin colour as a cultural marker has been diffused through the dissolution of black/white dichotomies, the foregrounding of gender and other forms of othering.

Recent Italian adaptations of Othello have chosen to concentrate on language and geography. This, Anna Maria Cimitile argues, was an overt act of ‘resistance to linguistic and cultural homogenization’. In her study, she follows Antonio Gramsci’s discussion of the ‘Southern Question’, regarding the use of regional dialects to resist fascist ideas of marginalizing the local through the hegemony of a single national vernacular, a process where the translation of Shakespeare was used as a tool. Othello’s ‘blackness’ was neither mentioned, nor suggested via make-up, but signified by regional verbal and body language, an act which redefined alterity as well as critiqued it as an act of regional othering with profound political implications. The rebalancing of the play thus underscored Desdemona’s otherness, both in terms of gender and culture.

Boika Sokolova and Kirilka Stavreva also explore how recent Bulgarian productions have re-located Othello, protagonist and play, in twenty-first-century post-communist Bulgaria in order to probe otherness within. In the theatre, burlesque, slapstick, music and dance, and spatial upstaging of Othello’s tragedy, foregrounded the brutalization of women. On film, Othello became ‘a tragedy of exclusion’, where the setting of a real prison, combined with the histories of the inmates, created a metaphor for post-communist Bulgarian society, its deprivations and arbitrary class justice. The authors use Tzvetan Todorov’s ethical philosophy to suggest how the film peels away the otherness of the prisoners, while the production estranges the women through cross-gender casting to make these Others stand before the viewer in all their vulnerability as human beings.

Just as with the Italian and Bulgarian productions, Aleksandra Sakowska views Krzysztof Warlikowski’s African Tales after Shakespeare in the context of the sensibilities, stereotypes and prejudices in twenty-first-century Poland. Through a theoretical approach deriving from Zygmunt Bauman, the essay discusses the radically reduced mélange of The Merchant of Venice, Othello and King Lear, supplemented with other modern texts and stark, shocking visual effects, which result in a ‘multi-focal exploration of identity’. Warlikowski deconstructs stereotypes of ethnicity, race, gender, sexuality, age and disability to confront Polish and international audiences with universal examples of marginalization. By conjoining three iconic outcasts – Shylock (the Jew), Othello (the black man), Lear (the debilitated old man) – the production simultaneously de-historicized the characters and challenged the audience’s perceptions of the ‘normal’ strange.

For Zorica Bečanović Nicolić, The Merchant of Venice and Othello are structured around ‘intricate webs of interpretation’, or rather, ‘mis-interpretation’, a hermeneutic approach, based on Hans-Georg Gadamer, which she applies in the discussion of their stagings in Belgrade. In Shylock’s Venice, moved to the late 1920s, with Italian fascism on the rise, the Strangers – homosexuals, Jews and other foreigners – were to be ghettoized as a danger to the social order. A stylistically radical production of Othello used a mixture of colours to mark symbolically otherness, locations and states of mind, while characters remained on stage throughout the action, reminiscent of both television reality shows and pervasive surveillance. In both productions, events in Shakespeare’s plays were projected onto the local context, where ‘every representative of any ex-Yugoslav nation in any of the ex-Yugoslav republics and now separate states, is the Other’.

Janice Valls-Russell draws attention both to the reluctance of French theatre to stage The Merchant of Venice and the evasiveness of interpretation. The two productions which are the subject of her essay break with this tradition by placing the action in the world of high banking and a small supermarket respectively, referencing recent anti-Semitic attacks in France. Drawing on Jean-Paul Sartre’s anatomization of the anti-Semite and Michel Maffesoli’s theorization of urban neo-tribalism, Valls-Russell suggests that these two productions projected a similar message: the Stranger no longer seems equal in terms of the ideals of the French Republic, which have come under increasing pressure in the new millennium.

The close analysis of the strategies of representation, interpretation and re-imagining of local European alterities highlights a heightened sense of social inequality and gender difference. Directors simultaneously engage with national assumptions regarding a collective identity and invite their audiences to look beyond the limitations of national representations. This is an invitation to reconnect through presentist re-envisionings of Shakespeare’s plays in a variety of European contexts, and the complexities, vulnerabilities and potentialities of living with the Other, both within and without.

1

‘Venice’ is elsewhere

The Stranger’s locality, or Italian ‘blackness’ in twenty-first-century stagings of Othello

Anna Maria Cimitile

Locality and the literary global

In Winter Sleep (2014), directed by the Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan, the protagonist is the owner of the Othello Hotel, in Cappadocia.¹ As it turns out, he is a former actor, writing a book on the history of Turkish theatre. In a stunning snowy landscape and picturesque village, in a country suspended between (and bridging) Europe and Asia, the name of the hotel, located in one of Cappadocia’s troglodyte dwellings, expresses the protagonist’s life-long love of drama and stands for theatre itself. In that exotic landscape the name, albeit unexpected, comes across as a scrap of the Western world that has reached a region otherwise remote from all that Othello would stand for: Western art, English literature, Shakespeare. To the viewer, the play has a double status: as a universal icon of theatre and as a specifically British canonical text.² Othello the character, on the other hand, is the Stranger in Venice and a Stranger in Turkey; not as ‘an extravagant and wheeling stranger, / Of here and everywhere’ (Oth 1.1.134–5), but because in the Anatolian space he is more evidently his ‘real’ self: an English, Anglophone ‘Venetian’ Moor.³

The sublime, desolate landscape of Cappadocia in Ceylan’s film is a unique locality that helps foreground the Europeanness-as-foreignness of Othello, not least because it stands in stark contrast to the play’s famous setting, Venice;⁴ in this respect, one could even say that the allusion to Othello in Winter Sleep enhances the locality (Venice) of an otherwise universal play. Although not an adaptation, the film reveals the relevance of space and place in the tragedy. It poses a question about what happens when stagings of Othello translocate the original setting; to answer which, one should first consider what ‘locality’ means when referring to Shakespearean plays. ‘Locality’ can denote multiple sites: besides the setting (Venice in Othello), it can point to the actual location of site-specific performances (e.g. the Venetian Ghetto in the 2016 production of The Merchant in Venice),⁵ or, following a trend in performance and reception studies, it can even refer to a wider space (nation, region, city) where the performance takes place.

For Alexa Huang, representing Shakespeare also means to represent the dynamics between different localities: Shakespeare’s and the actors’ (2007: 190). In the two Italian stagings I discuss here, those different levels of Shakespearean ‘locality’ are engaged by the directorial choices. To parallel the displacement of ‘Venice’ to another Italian region or city, the text is translated into a regional Italian dialect. As a result, the two versions invite a reflection on several related aspects: on translocating Shakespeare, and on the specific, emerging theoretical positionalities that arise when the location is the Italian South; on how those positionalities contribute both to a re-envisioning of Italian regional culture and to globally significant readings of Othello.

In recent years, critics have variously acknowledged that a relationship is always in place between global and local Shakespeare. For Huang, ‘“global Shakespeares” seems to be able to answer competing demands that artists and scholars become more transnational in outlook while simultaneously sustaining traditional canons’ (2013: 273). Sandra Young proposes to think of the two not as oppositional, but rather ‘as the constitutive elements of an appropriative “global”’ (2019: 15). Against the backdrop of, and in dialogue with, ongoing Shakespeare Studies developed in this vein, this chapter focuses on versions of Othello which move the setting from Northern to Southern Italy and from Shakespearean English to Italian dialects. What kind of theoretical impact on notions of global and local Shakespeare is potentially present in the specific literary interventions? How is the multi-layered otherness of Othello reconceptualized by a Neapolitan or Sicilian Otello? Can the discussion of two Othellos from the Italian South be related to, and actualize, Antonio Gramsci’s discussion of a ‘Southern Question’? I discuss Luigi Lo Cascio’s Otello (2015), translated into, or rather rewritten in, the Sicilian dialect by Lo Cascio himself, and Giuseppe Miale di Mauro’s Otello (2017), rendered into the Neapolitan dialect by Gianni Spezzano.⁶ Both directors chose Southern Italian regional cultures to stage the tensions around identity and difference in Shakespeare’s play, staging thereby the pressures over identity and difference experienced by those cultures.

Luigi Lo Cascio’s Sicilian Otello (2015)

The Sicilian Otello only retains the three main characters: Iago, Otello and Desdemona (Lodovico appears once, briefly), but adds a Soldier who acts as the Chorus of ancient Greek tragedy.⁷ He is a witness to the tragic events, which have already unfolded, and comes in mainly to address the audience and retell the story of the general and his wife. The past is made present, and the Soldier’s retelling frequ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART ONE Relocating otherness: The Other-within
• PART TWO New nationalisms, migrantsImperfect resolutions
• PART THREE Performative propositionsImperfect resolutions
• Index
• Copyright