Actor Tracy-Ann Oberman is to take on the role of Shylock in a production of The Merchant of Venice, basing Shakespeare’s Jewish villain on her grandmother, Annie.
“Women like her were tough as nails and so I pictured Shylock as a matriarch like that,” she said this week. “The 1930s was a very difficult time to be Jewish, to be working-class and to be a woman.”
Ms Oberman, who has been at the forefront of the battle against antisemitic trolls on Twitter, announced this week that she and the TV presenter Rachel Riley are adding the rock band Reverend and the Makers to a list of 70 Twitter users that they are suing.
She told the Guardian that her experience of fighting antisemitism online would inform her portrayal of Shylock. “It is a very problematic play. And it’s clear Shakespeare’s Shylock, along with Dickens’s Fagin, is difficult as a Jewish fictional stereotype, but when I watched the all-female Julius Caesar in 2012, I saw the way these roles can be open to reinterpretation.”
