Willard White on playing Othello: 'I broke down – I considered walking away'

Over the years, people have asked me whether I’d ever sing Verdi’s Otello. But of course it’s a tenor role, and I’m a bass, so I just smiled. I’d thought about Shakespeare’s play, of course, but always assumed I was in the wrong genre. Then I was working with director Trevor Nunn on a production of Gershwin’s opera Porgy and Bess at Glyndebourne in 1987, and he suggested it. Part of me never expected it to happen. But then a few years later he came back, and introduced me to Ian McKellen, who was going to play Iago. I cancelled the operas I’d been planning to do and made time for this instead.

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When I reread the play, the difficulty for me was Othello himself. He’s a man of great stature, this great general who falls in love, and then he destroys everything. I said to Trevor: “I don’t get him.” He said to me: “Well, he loves her from the beginning to the very end, that’s why.”

I realised people are killed in the name of love. But it was hard. After the scene where I knocked Imogen Stubbs’s Desdemona down and called her a whore, I went into my dressing room and broke down. You have to face certain questions. I considered walking away.

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One of the reasons the drama is so powerful is because of the relationship between Othello and Iago. Iago is an extremely powerful character, but Othello cannot be depicted as a fool, that’s very important. It needs to be a struggle between them; Iago’s deception has to be plausible.

And one thing you have to remember is that he’s not a jealous black man, he’s a jealous man. All of us can be guilty of enacting a situation – it’s not a question of colour. We point fingers, say it’s those people over there because they’re white or black or Chinese or whatever. But these are human questions: fear, the quest for love, for survival.

Of course the issues in the play are partly racial, but for me they’re not the defining factor. Yes, some of the language is racist, and characters are racist – Iago saying “an old black ram is tupping your white ewe” is racial. We mustn’t pretend that it’s not there. But it’s not the only thing in the play. And although the play has been associated with great actors such as Ira Aldridge and Paul Robeson and the fight for recognition and civil rights, I didn’t feel I was stepping into their shoes. I’m not that arrogant. You have to wear your own shoes.

When I started to rehearse, I thought – oh, I have total freedom! No conductor telling me when to come in, no legato or staccato to follow. But actually it’s not true, there’s a major conductor in the piece: Shakespeare himself. The iambic pentameter is a kind of music.

As an untrained person, it’s tempting to use your energy up too quickly. You’re five lines into a 30-line speech and you’re exhausted. You get lost in the depiction of the emotion. One of my fellow actors helped me with this, John Burgess – he told me that a friend of his always underlined the last word in each line of the speech and went for that. I tried it, it was a bit stilted at first, but it was a window, a way in.

Still, the play is crushing to perform. The final scenes most of all, where Othello turns on Desdemona and then kills her. I was taken into places where I didn’t want to go. I needed to open myself to the fact that this man is so torn by a desire for purity – or so impure himself – that he chooses the opposite side. People fainted during that scene. They said, “Oh, it’s the heat,” and perhaps it was, but it’s also truly horrible to watch. That’s why it’s a great play: we see ourselves on stage. Of course there are questions of race, it’s inevitable in a play like this, but ultimately it’s the human race we see in front of us.