This East End Merchant of Venice is potent – but it could be peerless
You could call The Merchant of Venice 1936 the “Oswald Mosley Merchant”. This ambitious, insightful, potentially indispensable account of Shakespeare’s notoriously problematic play relocates the action to London and the heart of the East End during a shameful era of emboldened British anti-Semitism. And it’s a passion project like no other for its star.
Working in creative consort with director Brigid Larmour, Tracy-Ann Oberman apparently makes theatre history as the first British actress to take on the lead. She’s also honouring family history: her grandmother and great-grandmother witnessed the bloody 1936 Battle of Cable Street, in which the Jewish community and its allies thwarted a British blackshirts march. Well-known for facing down anti-Semitism online, she has followed in their footsteps; modern cables, same battle.
Period footage of rallies by Mosley’s British Union of Fascists achieves a haunting vandalism, daubing, in flickering newsreel light, a dark street frontage that conjures Shylock’s residence and a synagogue. The opening vignette creates a corresponding sense of sheltering from harm and seeking solidarity; Oberman’s self-collected matriarch presides over the Passover Seder, lighting candles, saying prayers, the suggestion that of an old story of persecution being told once more.
Her Mitteleuropean accent is strong, and striking. Her attitude – stern, not easily sympathetic – is equally arresting. Oberman dares you to dislike Shylock, even as it’s made clear she has good cause to despise those she’s asked to lend to. Raymond Coulthard’s Antonio is a reptilian aristocrat, who loves an armband and Nazi salutes, and is no less besotted with money-grubbing Bassanio – who’s angling after Hannah Morrish’s Portia, the disdainful picture of Mitford-esque entitlement.
Shylock’s insistence on that “pound of flesh” – the forfeit of Antonio’s bond – is, as ever, almost unpardonable. But Act IV hits home even harder than usual: whatever inhumanity this “alien” displays, it’s outstripped by the monstrous judicial demolition job that ensues. Oberman’s moneylender, shorn of everything, sits slumped but stubbornly unmoved, as the wheels of state grind on, her tormentors scoffing in her face. Prior incidents of hate – the rowdy singing of an anti-Semitic reworking of Land of Hope and Glory, and a yobbish Gratiano urinating on her doorstep – stand revealed as part of a fundamental pattern of British institutional prejudice.
Is The Merchant of Venice itself anti-Semitic? Some have said that it should be cancelled. Dave Rich’s new book Everyday Hate talks of an “anti-Semitic caricature that has echoed down the ages”. Oberman clearly believes that it has spawned hate.
Yet the valuable outrage this production generates allows us to give Shakespeare the benefit of the doubt. Given Oberman’s view, I’d love the work itself to be put even more squarely in the dock. And I also yearned for more of the period context to seep in. The Battle of Cable Street itself is tacked on as a rousing coda of defiance, rather of a piece with overly brisk, textually truncated scenes elsewhere. The show should feel confident about digging deeper, and taking its time. Oberman and co are on to something. This is potent. It could be peerless.
In Watford until March 11; tickets: 01923 225 671; watfordpalacetheatre.co.uk; tour includes the RSC Swan, Sept 21-Oct 7 (rsc.org.uk). Tour details: merchant1936.co.uk
