The Merchant of Venice (1936)
Watford Palace and then touring | ★★★★✩

Perhaps it would be a good thing if everyone who staged The Merchant of Venice hated the play. After all this was the starting point for Tracy-Ann Oberman who with this production has used her antipathy for the work to achieve not one but two ambitions.

The first is to imbue Shakespeare’s most problematic play, which is viewed by many people as irredeemably antisemitic, with a Jewish sensibility. The other is to be the first woman to play Shylock in a significant production, as far as is known.

This adaptation by Oberman and her director Brigid Larmour adds 1936 to the title, the year Sir Oswald Mosley and his British fascists marched on London’s Jewish East End, culminating in what became known as The Battle of Cable Street, which is the road where Oberman’s Shylock lives above her pawn shop.

We begin not with the merchant Antonio announcing his sadness but the cast gathering on stage to light candles, recite a brucha or two and affirming that this Merchant is different from all other Merchants by asking why this night is different from all other nights.

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Raymond Coulthard as Antonio

After wine was blessed a murmur of “Ah-mein” rippled through the audience on this performance. It was like being in shul. And then, a moment later it very much was not like being in shul as projected black and white newsreel reported that columns of Mosleyites were on the march and recruiting for the British Union of Fascists. Raymond Coulthard’s smooth Antonio is one of them raising his fascist salute to the audience many of whom, on this night, were Jewish.

Antisemitic is not all this merchant is. He and his friends belong to Britain’s fascist aristo class - all the more reason for Oberman’s Shylock to enjoy the moment Antonio turns up to Venice’s Jewish quarter (here, London’s Jewish quarter) to request the loan.

More important than Shylock’s satisfaction however is that the power imbalance that is normally so evident when the Christian merchant and the Jewish money lender share the same scene is equalised. And all because Shylock is a woman.

Oberman deploys a rasping east European lilt for the role to suggest a past of pogroms. She has a fearless, steady gaze which meets the smug, entitled bearing Raymond Coulthard’s Antonio head on. Unlike many Shylocks that have gone before this one neither yearns for or needs the merchant’s respect.

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A scene from the play

The British class system theme bears more fruit with Hanna Morrish’s Portia. She wears boots and jodhpurs and has a haughty home counties disdain that deepens to contempt when she encounters Shylock’s Jewishness. True, Portia is disguised as a man but the absence of any sisterhood between her and Shylock in this male dominated court room is palpable. The news that Shylock herself is to cut out the pound of flesh comes as a complete surprise to the woman, crucially removing the notion of Jewish bloodlust that has so often informed past productions. Think of Patrick Stewart’s Shylock who donned a talit as he sharpened his knife.

Not every decision here works as well as it might. Designer Liz Cooke’s grey Cable Street buildings define Shylock’s grimy world well. But the opportunity to contrast the poverty of the Jewish East End with Belmont’s verdant garden is missed. Instead, grey continues to dominate as if all the hard thinking had been used up by the end of the play.

Still, no production I have seen better serves as an antidote to the way Jews are wronged by the play. And for that Oberman deserves much praise.