Othello dir. by Michael Thalheimer (review)

The German theater landscape remains overwhelmingly white, and so it should not surprise that, until relatively recently, Othello tended to be the least frequently performed Shakespearean tragedy on the German stage. The mostly all-white ensembles of regional theaters in particular confront directors with the question of how to approach Othello's skin color, which has too often resulted in practices of blackfacing. Parallel to the current rise of right-wing populism in Germany as well as all over Europe, theaters have now rightfully started to interrogate their own inherent exploitative power structures, and so the calls for more diverse onstage representation have become louder. In this socio-political climate, Othello proves especially topical. More innovative, if controversial, earlier responses to the question of how to play a German Othello include Jette Steckel's 2011 staging at Deutsches Theater, Berlin, in which the title role was played by a female actor in a gorilla suit. In Stefan Pucher's 2004 production at Deutsches Schauspielhaus, Hamburg, Othello simply washed off his blackface in the shower. It was within this tradition of experimenting with representations of race that Michael Thalheimer's production at the Berliner Ensemble situated itself.

In line with Thalheimer's signature directorial style, this Othello dealt in powerful images rather than nuanced characterization or textual—or indeed any other kind of—subtleties. Shakespeare's text was radically cut to a running time of just under two hours without interval, and the dramatis personae were stripped to the central characters—Othello, Desdemona, Jago, Emilia, and Cassio—with other characters' lines being allocated to a chorus. Against this sparse yet effectively condensed backdrop, the opening provided a powerful image: Othello and Desdemona, both naked, engaged in passionate sexual intercourse directly on the edge of the stage. Whereas Othello, played by the white actor Ingo Hülsmann, was covered in red paint, Desdemona (Sina Martens) wore white body paint. Throughout the sexual act, their respective colors rubbed off on each other. Othello's red color staining Desdemona's white body evoked the famous "dirty still" (Menzer 71) of Laurence Olivier's film adaptation of Othello (1965) that shows a black stain of Olivier's make-up on Maggie Smith's cheek, but in addition to referencing racist anxieties of miscegenation, the stains on Martens's body also had an overtly sexual symbolic value. Their lovemaking was accompanied by a chorus at the back of the otherwise bare stage. Dressed in grey trench coats and ghostly white paper bags with cut-out eyes on their heads, the chorus voiced their disgust at the scene in front of them: "Widerlich!" ("Disgusting!") "Ekelhaft!" ("Revolting!") "Abscheulich!" ("Abominable!"). As the chorus's position mirrored that of the audience—both situated in a semi-circle outside the stage lights, both prurient onlookers—this proved a clever way of establishing the chorus as the voice of society while simultaneously reminding the audience of their own complicity in the later turn of events. Through Othello—a white actor in red body paint described as black as per the playtext—Thalheimer emphasized that race is a construct. And just as Othello was not black, the other characters were not white either. Like Desdemona, Jago, Cassio, and Emilia wore white face paint, and the fact that the make-up gradually came off during the evening, in both a literal and figurative dropping of their masks, fittingly illustrated that none of them remained innocent in relation to the tragic events. Even though the production represented an inspired attempt to resolve the paradox in which most endeavors to visualize race and racial discrimination only reproduce normative whiteness, however, the production's stance towards race felt inconsistent. Despite both Thalheimer's arresting visuals and the play's postcolonial contextualization in the program notes (featuring excerpts from essays by Frantz Fanon...