Tracy-Ann Oberman’s grandmother and great-grandmother stood on the front line in the Battle of Cable Street in 1936, shouting ‘You shall not pass!’ at the ranks of British blackshirts marching under Oswald Mosley’s fascist banners. Oberman herself has been the subject of vicious antisemitic abuse, and in 2022 movingly addressed a House of Lords event celebrating women campaigners against racism.
Oberman’s family history shows that present fears are no less than horrible imaginings of the past. Mosley’s thugs may have gone down with the Nazis, but antisemitism is alive, well and living in a university, a political headquarters or a football ground near you, today, right now.
So this production of The Merchant of Venice is a passion project. Transplanting the story to the time and place of her own family’s suffering, and casting herself as the mater familias, a female Shylock, casts an aura of personal significance over the play. Oberman isn’t just acting Shylock; she’s consciously portraying her own female ancestors. Renaming it The Merchant of Venice 1936 also tells us that this isn’t Shakespeare’s play exactly, but something different, related, inspired by the original.
That’s certainly how the evening begins. Instead of the usual opening scene with Antonio in the street, we see a large Jewish family, with Shylock at its centre, celebrating Seder night. They even pass glasses of kiddush wine around the audience (I know we’re at the back end of the pandemic, but I’m still not quite ready to sip from a cup that’s already had the lips of thirty strangers on it). But the Passover festival is cut short by fascist bullies, and the loving family get-together is replaced by real archive footage of British Nazis in the 1930s.
So far so good.
It's at this point that Shakespeare’s text takes over, and we find ourselves in a London full of right-wing extremists, Antonio himself being one of the ring-leaders. Oberman’s re-imagining of the world of the play is compelling and thrilling. Right up until she speaks.
And at that point it all comes crashing down.
For reasons that I honestly cannot fathom, Oberman has given her Mother Shylock a grotesque and borderline offensive distortion of a Yiddish voice. She rolls her ‘R’s like Anthony Blanche in Brideshead Revisited. She sputters and exaggerates. She’s the Jewish equivalent of Lawrence Olivier blacked up as Othello and doing his ‘Moorish’ voice. More embarrassing than Maureen Lipman kvelling, ‘You’ve got an Ology!’ in the old British Telecom adverts. Maybe that’s how she remembers her granny speaking. But I met plenty of old East End Jews in the 1970s, people who’d grown up in the rag trade of the 1930s, and although they did have distinctive Yiddish accents, they did not sound like French opera singers choking while gargling on an excessive quantity of Listerine.
The effect on the production is disastrous. This Merchant is designed to humanise Shylock – more than that, it’s designed to make Shylock the most sympathetic character on the stage. But Oberman has turned her into a two-dimensional monster.
In the wake of that one awful creative decision, other aspects of the production start to shake at the foundations, and the illogicality of the interpretation is laid bare. Why, for example, would Shylock’s daughter Jessica be so desperate to escape her parental clutches if her mother is warm, caring and kind? Why would all the people in the courtroom scene be so incredulous at Shylock’s desire for revenge when Antonio is literally dressed as a Nazi officer and has just been participating in a pogrom against the local Jewish population?
Why, in fact, call the production The Merchant of Venice 1936? Why not simply call it The Merchant of Venice and set it in 1936? Shakespeare plays are always being set in different times, but they don’t advertise it by changing the title.
The problem is that this production has attempted to force One Big Idea onto the text and, almost like an allegory, to find direct London 1936 equivalents for everything in Shakespeare’s original. But it’s squeezing a square peg into a round hole, and too much of it just doesn’t fit. It also over-simplifies the complexity of its central character by trying to make Shylock totally good. (In the original, Shylock hates Antonio ‘for he is a Christian, But more for that in low simplicity he lends out money gratis’. In this version, the first reason has been tellingly removed – presumably because they didn’t want to admit that a victim of racism can also be prejudiced.)
At the end, Oberman leads the cast in echoing her ancestors and shouting, ‘They shall not pass!’ over and over again. They even force the audience to get up and join in, dragooning some innocent onlookers actually onto the stage. It was stomach-churningly embarrassing. The show simply had not earned the right to demand that level of emotional buy-in. We are not Tracy-Ann Oberman's therapy pawns, and being corralled by her into a reluctant anti-fascist mob feels in some ways no better than the hate-mongers she is opposing.
Vanity of vanities, saith the preacher.
The tragedy is that all this sound and fury is unnecessary. The Merchant of Venice addresses the issue of antisemitism deeply, and it does so while keeping its characters complex and three-dimensional. Directors don’t need to twist the lines to reveal the racism. It’s there in the text. Portia for example is an out-and-out white supremacist, openly praying that no black man will win her hand in marriage (‘Let all of his complexion choose me so’). Antonio spits at Jews in the street.
In attempting to point an accusing finger at British fascism, this production has reduced the play to a parade of goodies and baddies.