We all know about Shakespeare’s Jew, in Shylock, The Merchant of Venice, but what about Shakespeare’s Arab, in Othello: The Moor of Venice?

Well, the Shakespeare Theatre Company at the Harman Centre for the Arts in Washington has had something to say about that since February 23, when it began its staging of Othello, with the internationally acclaimed director Ron Daniels at the helm, complete with the Muazzen’s call to prayer in the background and the lead actor, Pakistani-American Farhan Tahir, attired in Muslim garb, prostrating with forehead to the floor, before committing the most egregious act of mayhem — driven, we are led to believe, by his nature as a Moor.

The play, seemingly about the doomed marriage between the exotic Moor Othello and the Venetian lady Desdemona, begins with mutual devotion and ends with jealousy and violent death at the hands of a man who appears to have harboured serious doubts about his assimilation in European society.

In Elizabethan England, the term Moor, or Morro elsewhere in Europe, referred pejoratively to the Muslims from the Maghreb countries of North Africa who, in AD711, had conquered the Iberian Peninsula — a land they went on to call Andalus, but from which they were expelled in 1492. Moors, stereotyped every which way in popular culture as well as in highbrow literature, were the ultimate ‘Other’.

Shakespeare apologists, essentially engaged in ‘bardolatory’ criticism, where their man is exempt from moral flaws, have a way about them of telling you that Shakespeare was never a racist. He did not, for example, mean for Shylock to be a repellent character, a greedy Jew. Far from it. Dustin Hoffman once played him as a loveable but clumsy person for whom things just never turned out to be right, and the great English actor Henry Goodman portrayed him as a tweedy academic. And who can forget Lawrence Olivier playing him on celluloid as a distinguished-looking banker type?

But try as hard as you can, as director or actor, to tamper with the original Shylock, and turn him into a complex Jew — imbued with heart and reasonableness, “If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?” — ultimately text and context come together and the racist image of the blood-thirsty Jew is revealed, a vengeful man who wants his pound of flesh. Shylock is Shylock. A different, saccharine Shylock wouldn’t be Shylock.

So it is with the current Washington Shakespeare Theatre Company’s production of Othello, where Othello, the unrefined Moor, encounters sophisticated Europeans, where Othello’s extremes of Muslim passions that deny reason, confront extremes of Venetian reason that deny passion.

Reasonably literate

This column is not a review of Othello. I barely pass muster as a political commentator, and I’m not about to advance myself as a theatre critic — by all counts a loftier calling than that of a hack. But do call me a reasonably literate individual who, at least on a visceral level, is able to see the racist tones in a racist play.

Truth be told, the Shakespeare Theatre Company’s production of Othello is above reproach. The play is competently acted and well directed. Pat Daniels, who brings a sure hand as a well-known director, sees to that. Jonno Roberts, who plays the satanic psychopath Iago (a character the therapeutic community today would recognise as afflicted with Borderline Personality Disorder) is the embodiment of evil. And Tahir’s iconoclastic performance is — theatre review rhetoric aside — incandescent. In fact as Tahir’s Othello, at the end of the play, spirals from hero to murderer (in current lingo, terrorist), we watch an actor perform, as Peter Marks, the Washington Post theatre critic wrote on March 1, “an unsettlingly convincing rendition of Othello’s epileptic fit, shaking as if 10,000 volts are coursing through his body ...”

Katrina Yeaw, a Washington Post subscriber, wrote a letter to the editor on March 12, explaining what she saw as a problem: “... The problem: Othello’s descent into madness results in him becoming less and less European in the fourth and fifth acts. His military uniform is replaced with Middle Eastern style robes and slippers. Rather than grappling with questions of difference, the play serves only to reinforce stereotypes about Muslim men as irrational and violent. This is particularly dangerous, given the current climate of hostility towards Muslims in the United States.” Couldn’t have said it any better!

I say blame the bard. Berate the page, not the stage, on which competent actors from the world of theatre continue to perform Shakespeare’s plays.

Fawaz Turki is a journalist, lecturer and author based in Washington. He is the author of The Disinherited: Journal of a Palestinian Exile.