‘This play has always fascinated and repulsed me and I don’t like it. I’ve never liked it.” It’s rare for an actor promoting their latest project to express revulsion. But nothing is simple for Tracy-Ann Oberman, playing Shylock in her own adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. How do Jewish creatives approach English literature’s most notorious antisemitic archetype? Indeed, why return to the source of so many bloodthirsty, moneygrabbing slurs?
Oberman first encountered the play aged 12. “It was taught in my school, very badly. In the playground afterwards everybody was running around, rubbing their hands, doing a ‘Jewish’ voice. It was cringe-making.” Nothing she saw as an adult reassured her. “I’ve seen productions where Shylock is mocked. I’ve seen versions where he’s a complete victim. I don’t know which is worse.”
Oberman gradually reimagined Shylock as a tough-as-nails widow, informed by her own family history. At 15, her great-grandmother came to England from her Belarus shtetl. Widowhood left her “a tough single mother in London’s East End. She lived in two rooms in a tenement flat near Cable Street until she was 98.” Oberman recalls other indomitable aunties: Machine-gun Molly (“men were terrified of her”) and Sarah Portugal, who “smoked a pipe, wore a slash of red lipstick – everything that was anathema to the aristocratic English. The very thing that made them survivors also made them outsiders – too loud, too brash, too strong, too opinionated.”
It led her to set The Merchant in 1936, when the Jewish community in London’s East End was threatened by Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists. Antonio, the merchant who visits Shylock to secure a loan (penalty for defaulting: the infamous pound of flesh) is based on Mosley. Portia, who humiliates Shylock in court, is inspired by the aristocratic Mitford sisters. “There wasn’t a dictator the Mitfords didn’t love,” says Oberman, adding, “Portia is seen as the beautiful heroine but actually, she’s a fucking bitch. She destroys Shylock and doesn’t need to.”
Mosley’s blackshirts attacked Jewish people and property, preparing to march through the district on 4 October 1936. “The police were beating up Jews and antifascists, not protecting them,” Oberman explains. “My great-grandmother always reminded me that their neighbours – their Irish neighbours, the small African-Caribbean community, the dockers, the working classes – all stood together. In our time, when nefarious sources try to pit minorities against each other, I hope this play shows we’re stronger, prouder and safer together.”
I watch an early rehearsal at the Watford Palace theatre, as the cast explore the first meeting of Shylock and Antonio. Oberman, blond hair piled up, is needling and twinkling, while Raymond Coulthard’s suave merchant drips contempt. He shudders when Oberman spits on her palm to seal the “merry bond” – but neither imagines that it will lead to disaster.
Oberman previously saw a workshop where Patrick Stewart (a notable Shylock for the RSC) claimed Jewish identity wasn’t key to the character. “Sorry, Sir Patrick, I fundamentally disagree. The Jewishness of Shylock is the entire point of the play.” That doesn’t mean playing for sympathy. “I’m not shying away from her villainy, because she becomes the monster that they make her. She sees them for who they are. Antonio’s prepared to slum it with me when he needs me even though he calls me dog and spits on me? Fuck him.”
Oberman is agog at her research – from the long tail of medieval antisemitism, to that of Elizabethan and 1930s London. She and director Brigid Larmour, she says, have become “walking encyclopedias of this world”. She traces the blood libel, used to justify medieval persecutions, through to the quibbles about bloodshed on which the trial turns. “You cannot help but look at when the play was written – a time of huge antisemitism in this country. That was Shakespeare’s world. Is it an antisemitic play? I think its legacy is antisemitic. So yes, I suppose it is an antisemitic play.”
Another leading Jewish actor feels differently. “It is an important and an uncomfortable play,” considers Henry Goodman, who starred in Trevor Nunn’s acclaimed National Theatre production in 1999, set in a 1930s Weimar atmosphere of cabarets and creeping fascism. “It showed a community of young people who liberated malevolent racism in an affectionate, easygoing society.”
Having previously resisted the role, he too read widely: about the Venetian ghetto (“they could lock the Jews up at night, but do business during the day”) and Christopher Marlowe’s “virulently antisemitic” The Jew of Malta. “I tried to understand the contemporary forces to get a sense of the inevitable question: is the play antisemitic? I think it depicts antisemitism, but is not antisemitic because it humanises. What does it cost a person if they are hateful, if they’re driven by wealth? If they’re racist or full of ugliness in their personal life? They shape their personality in self-diminishing ways.” Shylock and also his antagonists are afflicted. “The human drama is absolutely crucial. It says: This society is ruining itself by letting people perpetuate these things. This is not just antisemitic.”
Setting the play in 1930s England or Europe has an undeniable charge – there’s a reason it was a favourite with Nazi theatre-makers. In 1936, a performance of The Merchant in what was then Palestine was followed by a public debate, accusing the author, theatre and director of producing a play with “an anti-Jewish theme without being informed enough to treat the subject”.
“There’s no way to avoid a post-Holocaust sensibility” with the role, says Goodman, but he was startled by its performance history. “The worst depictions – the most virulent, filthy, hook nose – were performed by Jewish actors, such as Warren Mitchell.” He considers it a “faultline” through insecure assimilation: “elegant, sophisticated, integrated” creatives separating themselves from despised, unassimilated Shylock.
Did he feel a responsibility to reclaim the character? “It’s a fantastically creative burden,” he responds. “What coexists in Shylock is intelligence, decency, dignity – but also savagery.” Goodman exposed this conflict: “I smacked my daughter’s face, then kissed her forehead and sang the Sabbath prayer.” He noted Shylock’s muttered aside as he seals the bargain with Antonio: “If I can catch him once upon the hip, I will feed fat the ancient grudge I bear him.” His Shylock, living under the ghetto’s strictures, “was at the mercy of hatred just as much as Antonio. Trevor cut that line – we argued about it a lot. But I didn’t cut it in my soul, and in my instincts. It drove me.”
Shylock won Goodman an Olivier award yet he acknowledges, “you inhabit the role so deeply and intensely, I would come out with a sense of shame.” Ultimately, Goodman imagined his Shylock asking, “‘did I do the right thing? Have I brought myself and my nation down?’ There was a great sense of self-destruction.”
“I had no previous relationship with the play,” says Abigail Graham. However, preparing her hardline production for the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse at the Globe in 2022, the Jewish director was horrified to discover a 2005 survey that found audiences at a Stockholm production even more convinced that “the reason for antisemitism is the behaviour of Jews in history” than before they went in. Can this play actually create antisemitism? “This is why we had to go so radical with our version,” she says. “Because the last thing I wanted to do was make this problem worse. It’s not a play about antisemitism,” she insists. “It’s about the intersection between white supremacy, capitalism, patriarchy, antisemitism and racism.”
This impelled strong choices. An assertive edit included cutting the final act (“it follows a white Christian male’s journey”). Graham showcased Antonio’s distinct treatment of white and black colleagues, staged drinking games where lads downed a shot at every mention of “Jew” and “made Portia’s racism really clear in the courtroom scene”.
Rehearsals were “heady and intense” – especially for Adrian Schiller as Shylock, “a man who was bullied for the entire time. People were open about how they were feeling – a lot of tears.” When the show met an audience, Graham adds, “I felt my Jewishness in previews a lot. You’re sat among a mostly white audience and I found that experience really hard.”
Even so, the play left an unexpected legacy. “I feel more Jewish,” she says. “I went to synagogue this Rosh Hashanah for the first time in a really long time. It was difficult, but really enriching.”
Back in Watford, Oberman and I crouch beside the set model, which moves between East End streets and Portia’s swanky white sanctuary. How will Oberman’s Shylock end up? “Spoiler alert! Let’s just say there’s a political awakening. What always bothered me is that Shylock says ‘I am content’ [after the trial] and you never see her again. In our production, you absolutely see her again.”
She hopes the show itself will affect an awakening as it tours the UK, supported by extensive education resources. “This is a legacy heritage project for me because I want to reclaim The Merchant of Venice. So many teachers are terrified of the play and instead of dealing with it, don’t study it.”
More widely, “my dream is that the battle of Cable Street will be taught as part of the British civil rights movement. And personally? What does the project mean to her? “I’ve always wanted to reclaim Shylock,” she says. “I have lived and breathed this character for three years now. This is everything to me.”
The Merchant of Venice 1936 is at Watford Palace theatre, from 28 February to 11 March, then touring
