Ken Nwosu as Othello and Ralph Davies as Iago
Sam Wanamaker Playhouse
Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, London
February 2023
Photo by Johan Persson
076 – Othello, by William Shakespeare
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This episode explores Shakespeare’s devastating exploration of race, reputation and jealousy, The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice. When it was first performed during Shakespeare’s lifetime the play was a popular success, but in the centuries since it has provoked a wide range of responses as successive generations have grappled with the racial identity of the eponymous character. As we record this episode a new production of Othello at Shakespeare’s Globe theatre in London views the play’s treatment of race through a contemporary lens, setting the play within the London Metropolitan police force, a topical environment for racial inspection.
I am privileged to welcome as my guest someone especially qualified to help us navigate the tricky waters of Shakespeare’s play, Professor Farah Karim-Cooper, who is not only the Director of Education at Shakespeare’s Globe, and Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Kings College London, but she is also the author of a fascinating new book entitled The Great White Bard – Shakespeare, Race and the Future. It is a wonderful fresh take on Shakespeare that prompts us to acknowledge the white bias that has historically informed our interpretation and judgement of his work.
Shakespeare’s plays covered on The Play Podcast:
070 – King Lear
064 – A Midsummer Night’s Dream
048 – Much Ado About Nothing
038 – Macbeth
036 – Hamlet
005 – The Tempest
Farah Karim-Cooper
Farah Karim-Cooper is Professor of Shakespeare Studies, King’s College London and Director of Education & Research at Shakespeare’s Globe.
She has published over 40 chapters in books, reviews and articles and is a General Editor for Arden’s Shakespeare in the Theatre series and their Critical Intersections Series. Her pubished books include: Cosmetics in Shakespearean and Renaissance Drama (Edinburgh University Press, 2006, revised ed. 2019), The Hand on the Shakespearean Stage: Gesture, Touch and the Spectacle of Dismemberment (Arden 2016), and most recently The Great White Bard – Shakespeare, Race and the Future (One World, 2023).
In 2018 Farah curated the Globe’s first Shakespeare and Race Festival. She is an executive board member for RaceB4Race, a consortium of scholars and institutions that seek racial justice in the field of pre-modern literary studies.
Recommended Play
Farah recommended Red Velvet by Lolita Chakrabarti.
Photograph courtesy of Shakespeare’s Globe/Sarah Lee
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Douglas
112 – Glengarry Glen Ross by David Mamet
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David Mamet’s modern American classic, Glengarry Glen Ross, is a blistering commentary on the cut-throat reality of the American dream, and its poisonous impact on those who have bought into the myth and machismo of that dream. The play had its world premiere in the small Cottesloe theatre at the National Theatre in London in September 1983, and was first performed in New York the following year, winning the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Mamet also wrote the extended screenplay for the star-studded 1992 film version.
As we recorded this episode a new production of the play was playing at the Old Vic theatre in London, with an all-female cast. This is a particularly provocative idea, because one of the primary themes of this play is masculine identity, and the salesmen in this Chicago office do not hold back in their display of machismo.
To explore Mamet’s unflinching slice of 1980s dog-eat-dog capitalism, I am joined by arts journalist Mark Lawson.
111 – The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui by Bertolt Brecht
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Bertolt Brecht’s ‘gangster spectacle’, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, is both an exuberant and funny piece of theatre, and a chillingly topical political satire. Set in the 1930s Chicago of Al Capone, Brecht presents a parody of the rise of Hitler through the character of the gangster Arturo Ui. The play is a universal cry for vigilance against the rise of unscrupulous, populist leaders who threaten democratic societies and global peace.
As we recorded this episode a new production of the play by the Royal Shakespeare Company was playing in Stratford-upon-Avon, starring Mark Gatiss as the title character.
I am delighted to be joined by both the show’s translator, playwright Stephen Sharkey, and by Brecht scholar, Professor Tom Kuhn, to guide us through Brecht’s political parody.
110 – Our Town by Thornton Wilder
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Playwright Edward Albee described Thornton Wilder’s Our Town as “the greatest American play ever written.” In fact Wilder’s quintessential portrait of rural America in a bygone time has somehow transcended its iconic American setting to become a universal meditation on mortality, community, and how we live our individual lives, wherever that may be.
The play premiered on Broadway in 1938, winning Wilder the Pulitzer Prize, and it has been a staple of school, amateur and stock performance ever since. In fact, according to critic John Lahr writing in the introduction to the text of the Penguin edition, “the play is performed somewhere in the world every day.”
Howard Sherman, author of Another Day’s Begun – Thornton Wilder’s Our Town in the 21st Century, joins me to explore this American classic.
Michael Sheen as the Stage Manager in Our Town, Welsh National Theatre, photo by Helen Murray.
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