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David Harewood is returning to the role of Othello almost 30 years after he became the first black actor to play the character at the National Theatre in London. He will do so opposite Toby Jones as Iago and Caitlin FitzGerald as Desdemona at the Theatre Royal Haymarket, directed by Tom Morris, this autumn.
Speaking to the Guardian after an early read-through for the West End production, Harewood described Othello as “a fantastically challenging piece of work” for actors. When the suggestion was made that he play the part again, it “lit the touch paper”, he said. “I couldn’t stop thinking about it.” He picked up a copy of the play and discovered: “It felt very fresh to me. Most of the lines I already remembered, which was extraordinary. They’re sort of imprinted in my brain.”
In 1997, Harewood took on the role at the National Theatre, where Laurence Olivier had played Othello in blackface in a 1964 production that also became a film. “The last time I played it I was very conscious of being the first black actor to play it at the National,” said Harewood. “I think I was carrying perhaps a little bit more of the history than I was aware of at the time.” The weight of that groundbreaking occasion meant that, before he went on, he forgot his first line and had to ask his co-star Simon Russell Beale (who played Iago) to remind him.
This time, said Harewood: “I’m looking forward to approaching it from the point of view of just another actor playing just another part. That perhaps gives me the freedom to explore it slightly differently.” Harewood, who will turn 60 in December, quoted one of Othello’s lines – “I am declined into the vale of years” – when explaining that he would reflect on his own ageing process as he approaches the text.
In the National production, he added: “I think I was manufacturing quite a lot of the emotion. I can remember that very vividly. I don’t think I’ll have to do that [this time] because it’s simply much more available to me now.” Harewood said he had spent recent years “digging into some of my own personal trauma” and “looking into the abyss” while reflecting on the psychotic breakdown he had in his 20s, in part through a BBC documentary and his book Maybe I Don’t Belong Here. “I’ve come out the other end stronger. So I believe that I’m not afraid to explore that trauma … to really examine the darker parts of my own psyche.”
In 1997, the Guardian’s Michael Billington called Harewood’s performance “first-rate”, observing how his Othello “disintegrates with total conviction: at his lowest, he is reduced to ransacking Desdemona’s dressing table and sniffing the bed sheets. Yet, in the final scenes, he captures the broken music of a tortured soul.”
It will be the third time Harewood has appeared in a stage production of Othello, after first playing the role in 1991 in Worcester. In 2016, he returned to the part for a scene shot at Othello’s Tower in Famagusta, Cyprus, for a series of short films made by Shakespeare’s Globe. A year earlier, he made a documentary about Othello, speaking to other actors including Adrian Lester, who played the part at the National in 2013.
Morris’s production of Othello, featuring music by PJ Harvey and a design by Ti Green, will run at the Theatre Royal Haymarket from 23 October to 17 January. It is the first in a series of modern Shakespeare stagings to be created by Morris for Chris Harper Productions over the next five years.
