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.”

She is working with the director Brigid Larmour on the role. They are in discussions with an artistic director, and will work on the script with a group of actors at the Watford Palace Theatre in May.

She hopes the new version will pay tribute to other Jewish women, such as Ms Riley and the MPs Luciana Berger, Ruth Smeeth and Dame Margaret Hodge, who have spoken out on Jew hate in the Labour Party.

“They have been incredibly brave,” she said. “And the response has been racism and misogyny that I wouldn’t have believed and that hasn’t been seen since the 1930s. But I have tried with everything that’s happened to put it to positive use. I hope it has pushed my creativity into much more powerful and positive directions, not just in seeing a new way to play Shylock, but in a new podcast I am about to launch called ‘Trolled’.”