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In the just on sixty years over which an annual Shakespearean play has been given at the Maynardville Theatre-in-the-Park in Wynberg, Cape Town, Othello has been staged four times. I happen to have seen all four productions, and what follows is both a formal theatre history and a series of personal reflections on the play as performed in four distinct historical contexts.The first production, under the direction of Leonard Schach, was mounted in 1970, fifteen years after the opening of the theatre. This was at a time when "granite apartheid' was in its ascendency - segregationist policies were arrogantly applied. Twelve years elapsed before Roy Sargeant's Othello, the second, was presented. By then, the country had witnessed the Soweto Uprising, MK (Umkhonto we Sizwe, the armed wing of the African National Congress) was placing bombs "at many military and apartheid targets around the country" and the white leadership was rather less sure of itself.1
By the time that Keith Grenville's Othello was staged in 2001, the move from the "old' to the "new' South Africa had already taken place. The mood of the country was still influenced by the euphoria of the "rainbow nation' and the future appeared rosy with many expectations. A further fourteen years were needed to make the moment ripe for Maynardville's fourth Othello, directed by Fred Abrahamse. This version of the play appeared in the context of disappointment with political leadership, widespread suspicion of corruption in high places, anxieties about education and health-and even doubts that the national electricity supply would be sustainable.
In my experience, any worthwhile production of a Shakespearean text tends to take on the flavour of the socio-political climate prevailing at the time of its performance; at Maynardville, I have seen a Macbeth translated into Zulu cultural norms (Umabatha, 1974), a version of The Winter's Tale (1997) that reflected modern gender theory, and a Twelfth Night (1998) conveying the spirit of the rural Western Cape. But what of Othello and the South African obsession with skin colour? Literary critics have locked horns on the issue of race in the play. For example, Emily C. Bartels has tried to show that the title character is located somewhere between the European and non-European worlds, with a problematic racial identity....