Photo by Prudence Upton
Caucasian brothers from Chicago, DG Rappers GQ and JQ, have been translating Shakespeare into hip hop for fifteen years. They’ve done shows like The Bomb-itty of Errors and Funk It Up About Nothin’ (also in Australia) but Othello: The Remix is their first work on a Shakespearean tragedy.
With just two other dudes, all four in jumpsuits, trainers and the obligatory reversed baseball caps, they leap and jive through an Othello half as long as the original. The surprise is that the Bard’s iambic pentameter slots so neatly into the 4/4 hip hop tempo and the smart, contemporary rhyming couplets from the Q brothers.
The hero soldier Othello (Postell Pringle) becomes MC O, the master rapper, who, much to Iago’s resentment, takes as his support act a kind of Justin Bieber, boy-band lightweight called Cassio (Jackson Doran). Overlooked, Iago (GQ), the orthodox rapper, becomes a livewire whippet of revenge, an Eminem on speed.
The tale of the missing handkerchief, with which Iago plots to blacken the name of Othello’s virtuous Desdemona, is here a chunky rapper’s medallion. And effectively we never see Desdemona; she remains just the pure voice of a beautiful, white songstress.
The other women, Emilia and Bianca, are played by Doran and JQ with high camp manner and the slimmest of drag. All four join the burlesque for one of the incidental and very funny songs, ‘It’s a Man’s World (but it don’t mean nothing without a woman or a girl)’. Othello is indeed a man’s world and these all-boy rappers remind us that the often, or at least once, misogynistic world of hip hop is here another good fit.
Just as people often protest of the original Shakespeare, some of the words in this Remix are impossible to hear, even as your foot pounds with the beat of their delivery. Pringle’s Othello suffers here and so the tragedy of his descent into murderous jealousy is not well articulated (a descent admittedly often inexplicable in the original).
But overriding all on this bare, industrial space for a stage is the relentless energy, inventiveness and streetwise wit and banter of the Chicago Shakespeare Theater.
Powerful moments like GQ’s Iago dancing on the packing case, manipulating his peers and revelling in his devices as The Puppetmaster, shows a company able to speak to new ideas and audiences but also add much to the storytelling of Shakespeare.
Rating: Four out of five stars
Othello: The Remix
Chicago Shakespeare Theater and Richard Jordan Productions Ltd
Written, directed and composed by GQ and JQ
Sydney Festival
York Theatre, Seymour Centre, Chippendale
www.sydneyfestival.org.au
23-26 January
