The Merchant of Venice 1936 review – Shylock takes on Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts

Righteous anger … Tracy-Ann Oberman in The Merchant of Venice 1936 at Watford Palace theatre. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

In Tracy-Ann Oberman and Brigid Larmour’s re-envisioned production, Shakespeare’s merchant is living in 1930s east London amid the rise of Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts. Smashed glass off stage foreshadows the battle of Cable Street in 1936 though there are also echoes of Kristallnacht in the intermittent sound.

At the centre stands Oberman’s Shylock, the Jewish moneylender who demands “a pound of flesh” from Antonio (Raymond Coulthard) to exact justice and is punished with a forced conversion to Christianity as part of the play’s rather contrived happy ending. Antonio is a Blackshirt while Portia (Hannah Morrish) is a Mitford-style socialite. Both are charming aristocrats, coolly chilling in their amicability.