Do We Not Bleed? Tracy-Ann Oberman's The Merchant Of Venice 1936: York Preview
Plus What's On Nov 13-19
“Never let actors choose the play,” said a writer-director friend with unaccustomed decisiveness. We’d just sat through a cringeworthy performance of the winning entry in a playwriting competition organised by a regional branch of the actors’ union Equity and kindly sponsored by a local firm of solicitors.
The solicitors — and, God knows, there are a lot of Jewish people in the legal profession — had just watched a performance inspired by one of the big splits in the early Nazi party. The audience had been invited (by, I think, the irresistible forces of effective drama rather than conscious design) to feel sympathy for a repulsive individual called Gregor Strasser.
Actors adore playing Nazis. In choosing this play, they’d fallen in love with all that declaiming, saluting and goose-stepping, and it had over-ridden their commonsense.
For this reason I was less than overjoyed when I read that Eastenders actress Tracy-Ann Oberman was starring as Shylock in her own stage adaptation of The Merchant Of Venice — a version which relocates the action to London’s pre-war East End, where Oswald Mosley’s British fascist movement was visible and active.
Oberman is clearly intending to draw modern-day parallels. But I’m impatient with that left-wing meme about the ‘resurgent hard right’. It’s very easy to find yourself portrayed as a member of the ‘resurgent hard right’ nowadays. Saying ‘men can’t be women’ was usually enough to get yourself debarred as a fascist on old Twitter. The “hard right” is exactly the sort of thing that the more irritating sort of leftie actress invokes to explain away the mass unpopularity and poor predictive power of certain ideas.
In the 1930s Oswald Mosley and his blackshirts were a real threat. Would the British working class embrace or reject the lure of Nazism? I am proud to say they rejected it — with the famous Battle Of Cable Street being a decisive moment in that rejection.
But nowadays fringe organisations like the English Defence League are still very far from the levers of power — and in any case have flipped their allegiance in recent years, being preoccupied with the Islamist threat rather than Jew-bashing.
So, personally, I’m more concerned about the quiet totalitarianism of the left, which has found a happy home in our universities and other mainstream cultural institutions.
But it turns out our Tracy — best known for burying Dirty Den in the cellar during her character’s eventful 18 month stint on EastEnders — has something new to say about Shakespeare’s play The Merchant Of Venice. She is of Jewish immigrant stock — the matriarchs in her family were involved in the East End’s ‘schmutter’ (wholesale fabric) trade — and her 2023 touring production, directed by Brigid Larmour, foregrounds the antisemitism in the play instead of trying to explain, excuse or hide it away.
I have always found the Merchant of Venice, ostensibly one of Shakespeare’s comedies, a difficult play with few likeable characters. On one level it is an unrealistic fairy tale — Portia’s suitors are set a task which involves choosing between three caskets — but on the other it deals with the brand-new phenomenon of commercial men, owing their allegiance to no feudal master but building their fortunes via modern trade with the newly discovered colonies. In Venice, it seems everything is for sale — including love and loyalty.
The stereotype of the usurious Jew is built in at the ground floor. Shylock is the guy (or in this case, girl) you go to when your credit is bad. You’ll get a loan at extortionate rates, with nobody asking too many questions.
Shakespeare was a shrewd cookie. A survivor. His own pro-Catholic Arden relatives experienced the impact of Tudor political reversals when they were arrested for subversion. He knew that if he wasn’t careful his words might earn him imprisonment, torture and an excruciating death. The colonisation of America opened up North-Western Europe, turbo-charged ports like Bristol, and heralded the slow decline of the Venetian and Ottoman empires. So really, he was writing about England but set the action far, far away.
And everything had to have plausible deniability, in case the winds changed. So whilst the antisemitism is certainly there — and a very odd thing given that in Tudor times there were almost no Jews living openly as such on these islands — it’s balanced out with ambiguous appeals to our common humanity.
The Merchant Of Venice 1936 sold out when it opened in Watford earlier this year, a co-production between Trafalgar Theatre Productions and Eilene Davidson Productions, in association with the Royal Shakespeare Company. But will it do well in this part of Yorkshire, where the Jewish population is tiny and where, despite the horrifying Clifford’s Tower mass-suicide in 1190, issues around anti-semitism have almost no resonance?
Perhaps not. But events in the Middle East have, in recent weeks, projected the theme to national consciousness. It has been brought to our mass attention, as nothing else could, that the vilest propaganda — antique stuff we thought was put to bed forever after the defeat of the Nazis — is circulating online and finding a ready audience of new believers.
Although this time round the biggest threat to the safety and security of Jewish people living in the UK is coming not from Mosley’s strutting blackshirts but from a different direction entirely. York Theatre Royal, Nov 14-18, Manchester HOME, Nov 28-Dec 2, plus nationally.
What’s On Around Yorkshire Nov 13-19
The later stages of November are a time of thin pickings for theatre. Everything is gearing up to the financially crucial pantomime season, which starts towards the end of the month and continues until January. Your best bet is a trip to the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough to see Boys Khaya, choreographed by Bawren Tavaziva.
Born in rural Zimbabwe, Tavaziva was fortunate to attend a dance programme that targeted talented under-privileged youngsters and was selected to join extra classes for the most talented. At 18 he became an apprentice for Tumbuka Dance Company, touring Africa and Europe for five years before moving permanently to the UK and forming Tavaziva Dance. Nov 13, £15
Done To Death, By Jove
This is funny. Company Gavin Robinson’s two-hander satirises the British cosy murder tradition of Poirot, Miss Marple and all the rest of them, and can be seen at the Forum, Northallerton, Nov 15, £8-£12.50, Ripon Arts Club, Nov 16, £10£12, Potto Village Hall, Nov 17, and the Wilson Centre in Thirsk, Nov 18, £8-£12. Tickets from Rural Arts.
Kwaidan: Japanese Ghost Stories
I’d recommend a Taiko drumming version of two of cult Japanese author Lafcadio Hearn’s most infamous ghost stories at theatre@41monkgate in York on Nov 19. But it sold out in a flash. So I offer it merely for information. (Memo to artistic directors: The People want Japanese ghost stories, especially if there is Taiko drumming involved.)
The Cost Of Everything
This interactive game show invites you to solve the cost-of-living crisis live on stage by considering such issues as the housing shortage, food supply chains and choices about renewable (including nuclear) energy. You can participate online as a remote worker by ordering tickets here. Nov 17, £15.
And finally a couple of amateur shows, which often come to the rescue at this time of year:
Elf The Musical, presented by Middlesbrough Youth Theatre at Middlesbrough Theatre has perennial charm, Nov 14-18, £15 & £18
Breathing Corpses, a pitch-dark comedy by Laura Wade, can be seen at Lantern Theatre, Sheffield, Nov 14-18, £12-£14. It is presented by the venerable Dilys Guite Players and anyone who has worked as a chambermaid will laugh like a drain.
That’s it for this week, folks. As I said, it’s a thin time of year. And between fetching Mepilex wound dressings from the duty pharmacist, removing blood stains from my mother’s carpet (officer, I can explain everything), a trip to Wetherby on Parish Council business and a migraine (well, it might have been a hangover — it was a very strange bottle of ‘fruity’ red from the fine collection on sale in our village shop) — I’m feeling wrung out. My mum is fine — she’s healing nicely — but I need a rest. So I won’t be sending out a newsletter next week.
I’ll be back towards the end of the month with Christmas shows. See you then.
Liz x
I appreciate your the calm, thoughtful and grounded comment on the arts.
Good quality discussion of the arts can get to the heart of things - the existential heart of them - and can be a nourishing antidote to clicky news-and-reaction of any political colour.