The despair and grief brought about by novel coronavirus and not so novel racism has made radical change not just possible, but inevitable.
The new normal is already upon us, physically and culturally. As if heralding the era, Iqbal Khan’s 2015 Royal Shakespeare Company production of Othello starring Hugh Quarshie has been given a new lease of life on iPlayer and will be broadcast on BBC4 as part of the corporation’s Culture in Quarantine programme.
The underlying admirable objective of the production, in which Lucian Msamati is the RSC’s first black Iago, is to expunge the play of the racist notion that Othello behaves as he does because he is black.
Meanwhile, the RSC’s response to the killing of George Floyd and the rise of Black Lives Matter activism includes a video in which some of the country’s finest black actors recite the “Hath not a Jew eyes” speech from The Merchant of Venice.
