Headline political tensions give depressing topicality to the 1936 Battle of Cable Street, when east London immigrant communities united to resist the shattering, scattering violence of Oswald Mosley’s fascists.
The fight for the streets is the background to Tracy-Ann Oberman’s chilling Shakespearean revision The Merchant of Venice 1936 (currently in London) and is now musicalised in Cable Street. Whereas Oberman properly focused, for textual and contemporary reasons, on antisemitism, Tim Gilvin’s songs and Alex Kanefsky’s script explore the broader historical context of Jews in London finding common cause with Irish and Caribbean communities and socialists fighting fascism in Spain. The framing device of a modern historical walking tour allows London’s diasporas to be brought up to date.
