Reclaiming Shylock

As a new adaptation of The Merchant of Venice opens, Jewish creatives explain how they tackle the notorious role.

- David Jays

This play has always fascinated and repulsed me and I don’t like it. I’ve never liked it.” It’s rare for an actor promoting their latest project to express revulsion. But nothing is simple for TracyAnn Oberman, playing Shylock in her own adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. How do Jewish creatives approach English literature’s most notorious antisemitic archetype? Indeed, why return to the source of so many bloodthirsty, moneygrabbing slurs?

Oberman first encountered the play aged 12. “It was taught in my school, very badly. In the playground afterwards everybody was running around, rubbing their hands, doing a ‘Jewish’ voice. It was cringe-making.” Nothing she saw as an adult reassured her. “I’ve seen productions where Shylock is mocked. I’ve seen versions where he’s a complete victim. I don’t know which is worse.”

Oberman gradually reimagined Shylock as a tough-asnails widow, informed by her own family history. At 15, her great-grandmother came to England from her Belarus shtetl. Widowhood left her “a tough single mother in London’s East End. She lived in two rooms in a tenement flat near Cable Street until she was 98.”

Oberman recalls other indomitable aunties: Machinegun Molly (“men were terrified of her”) and Sarah Portugal, who “smoked a pipe and wore a slash of red lipstick – everything that was anathema to the aristocratic English. The very thing that made them survivors also made them outsiders – too loud, too brash, too strong, too opinionated.”