This startling new take on Shakespeare’s problem antisemitic play was well worth the wait

For actor Tracy-Ann Oberman and director Brigid Larmour, this radical reimagining of the Shakespeare classic has been years in the making (including a two-year delay thanks to the pandemic). Indeed, Oberman herself said it's been "a lifelong dream of mine to bring this play to the stage in a new way". So, the opening night was filled with extra special meaning and resonance.

The clue to Oberman’s unique response to the play lies in the title: The Merchant of Venice 1936. That year saw huge numbers of Jews and other East End residents, many from immigrant communities, clashing with right-wing Mosleyites (named for their fascist leader Oswald Mosley) in the now renowned 'Battle of Cable Street' – where the Fascists were named, shamed and defeated. Oberman’s proud personal connection is the very active participation of family members in the battle, including her grandmother, about which she speaks in the Winter 2023 issue of JR.

Shylock is reinvented as a tough, widowed Jewish matriarch, who ekes out a living as a moneylender. The ‘Christians’ in the original play are represented here as fascist antisemites, starting with Antonio (Raymond Coulthard), the eponymous Merchant, and backed up by Bassanio (Adam Buchanan), who's courting wealthy heiress Portia.

Some nifty reinventions noted in the programme see Hannah Morrish’s confident Portia as "a better educated Diana Mitford" (the fascist sympathising wife of Mosley), Adam Buchanan’s Bassanio, along with his wingman Gratiano (blonde moustachioed Xavier Starr) and Lorenzo, who's in love with Shylock’s daughter Jessica, are penned as posh young ‘Bullingdon boys’. Perhaps most tellingly, Antonio is described as "an aristocratic fascist and follower of Mosley". Liz Cooke’s set and costumes gracefully enhance the 20th-century relocation.

This thoughtful refocusing works poignantly well. The opening scene, almost a new prologue, sees Oberman’s Shylock lighting Shabbat candles with additional prayers for Passover. This instantly gives an insight into the production’s take on what life might have been like for such women, fighting for a living, for faith, dignity and family in 1930s London. At her side is the gymslip-clad Jessica (Gráinne Dromgoole), played as a naive and typically rebellious teenager, who hides her forbidden love for Priyank Morjaria’s ardent Lorenzo (a "highly assimilated Indian aristocrat").

While the über-fascist Antonio, sinister from the get-go in his severe black shirt (a uniform for which people dubbed them Blackshirts), no longer opens the play, he still gets Shakespeare’s opening words: "In sooth, I know not why I am so sad…". These lines, delivered in the chilly cut-glass accent of all the high-class Christians here, make it abundantly clear that his sadness lies in his unrequited love for Bassanio, with whom he hopes to curry favour by furnishing him the money to court the privileged Portia, thus leading him to demand the loan from Shylock.

As usual, it's almost impossible to get past the contrivance of Shylock’s so-called ‘merry jest’ to ask for a pound of flesh rather than money as the bond pledged to secure the loan, which sets the plot in motion.The trial scene, where Shylock is backed into insisting on that impossible pound thanks to Portia’s passionate virtue signalling – here demanding rather than pleading for mercy from Shylock – is a real mockery. We've already seen her elegantly clad in satin, humiliating her multiracial suitors, so her thinly-disguised glee at Shylock’s predicament is no surprise.

The dice are always loaded against Shylock, all the more here because she's a woman. The distressing indignity is compounded by overtly threatening behaviour from these menacing ‘gentlemen', some now sporting red fascist armbands and Gratiano even wrapping himself in a Union flag. No wonder Shylock seeks sanctuary in the synagogue.

There’s strong support from Jessica Dennis, who gets to play both Nerissa, Portia’s companion and "poor relation", and Mary (reassigned from Gobbo), Shylock’s runaway servant, described in the notes as "East End Irish Catholic”. The cast is completed by Alex Sur, who plays Shakespeare’s only other male Jew, here Yuval rather than Tubal and, by contrast, the Duke presiding over the trial.

Highlighted with warm glowing reds, Liz Cooke’s costumes gracefully complement the monochrome London skyline back projection to her set with its contemporary footage of Cable Street and some informative poster-like messages (video designer Greta Zabulyte). Music and movement are, respectively, down to Erran Baron Cohen and physical actor par excellence Richard Katz, with artistic input from Complicité's Annabel Arden.

The only problematical note is the final epilogue, which steps out of the play into a reenactment of the events at Cable Street and brings all the East Enders – Jews and non-Jews – together as they build a barricade against the Blackshirts. Its rousing sentiments are laudable, but it feels like an unnecessary and clunky ending when its point has already been made so eloquently by the play itself.

Nevertheless, this realisation of the careful collaboration of Oberman and Larmour is a satisfying one. The Merchant of Venice 1936 is powerful, unsettling, and with implications for now.

By Judi Herman

Photos by Marc Brenner

The Merchant of Venice 1936 runs until Saturday 11 March. 7.30pm, 2.30pm (dates vary). £5-£132. Watford Palace Theatre, WD17 1JZ. watfordpalacetheatre.co.uk

The show then tours to: Manchester (15-25 Mar) and Stratford-upon-Avon (21 Sep-7 Oct).