LONDON — Tracy-Ann Oberman says she’s “always hated” William Shakespeare’s play “The Merchant of Venice.”
It’s no surprise that one of Britain’s leading Jewish actors and campaigners against antisemitism isn’t a fan of a play whose central character — the villainous moneylender, Shylock — is the most infamous and notorious Jewish figure in literature.
“Like many Jewish kids at school… we learned it when we were quite young,” Oberman tells The Times of Israel. “We were reading it out in class and I was always asked to play Shylock.”
The play, which contains a welter of medieval tropes about Jews, was a favorite of Hitler’s and was performed many times in Nazi Germany, she adds: “It’s a really difficult play.”
What’s more surprising is that starting December 28, Oberman will embark on another run of her highly acclaimed adaptation of “The Merchant Venice” on London’s West End following previous sell-out stints in the capital and around the country.
Oberman’s “The Merchant of Venice 1936,” however, comes with a twist. She has transported the play from 16th century Venice to 1930s London, when Oswald Mosley’s fascists menaced the capital’s heavily Jewish East End. The actor has also taken the role of Shylock and — drawing on her own family history — reimagines the character as a tough, widowed single mom.
But it is events off stage — the October 7 Hamas atrocities in Israel and the ensuing surge in antisemitism in the UK and throughout much of the Western world — which has given the play added meaning and poignancy.
Oberman’s acting career has seen her perform a multitude of roles, including in the UK’s top soap opera, “EastEnders,” as Auntie Val in the beloved comedy series about a Jewish family, “Friday Night Dinner,” and in the heart-wrenching drama “It’s a Sin,” which tackles the AIDS crisis of the 1980s.
Given this track record, why did she want to take on “The Merchant of Venice,” especially given recent calls for it to no longer be performed?
“I don’t think you have to erase history,” Oberman responds. “I think you need to look at history and reframe it.”
She had long been interested in how the play might be retold to show the “brutality towards a Jewish character” which rests at its core.
“I don’t think that plays shouldn’t be performed because they’re difficult. I think they have to be done and put into a context that shows just how difficult they are and why they’re difficult,” the actor says.
Women who don’t duck a challenge
Oberman’s great-grandmother, Annie, became the model for her reimagined female Shylock. At the turn of the century, the teenager fled to England from pogroms in Belarus. By the mid-1930s, Annie was a struggling widow bringing up her family alone in London’s East End.
Annie wasn’t a woman to duck a challenge: When Mosley’s Blackshirts decided to march through the East End in October 1936, she and her children were on the front line in what became known as “The Battle of Cable Street.” Oberman’s great-uncle, Al, was thrown through a window by the fascists but, facing a wall of unyielding local working-class resistance, Mosley’s men were forced to retreat.
Like her great-grandmother, Oberman isn’t one to shirk a fight, either. Over much of the past decade, she has combined her work as an actor and a playwright with high-profile activism fighting antisemitism. A lifelong supporter, she quit the Labour Party in protest at rising Jew hate in its ranks under the hard-left former leader Jeremy Corbyn. Her stand earned her the admiration of many — and the enmity of the “Corbynistas.”
As Labour lurched sharply to the far left, antisemitic tropes about Jews that had previously been “mumbled in pubs among extremists were suddenly brought into the main house,” Oberman says.
At the same time, “places where we should feel safe — nice, progressive left places” became altogether less welcoming.
“I put my head above the parapet because I come from a Holocaust background,” she says. “We know where [antisemitism] goes if it doesn’t get challenged, and I found that I became an object of an enormous amount of abuse.”
That abuse underlined to Oberman that “antisemitism and misogyny go hand in hand.” “There’s nothing that people hate more [than] … a woman who won’t shut up, particularly if they’re seen as an outsider,” she says.
It was always so. Oberman speaks admiringly of the “tough, strong Jewish women” — many of them widows, like her great-grandmother — who found that the skills and qualities that had kept them alive in the Russian Empire made them the object of vilification in interwar England.
“They knew how to cut deals, could run the family businesses, [and] scrape a living together,” she says. They were political too: warriors not just against antisemitism but exploitation and inequality. But many people in Britain at the time preferred their women to be “quiet, decorative, non-political,” she added.
The tight relationship between hatred of women and hatred of Jews — both then and now — meant “it made perfect sense to … give Shylock a female gender,” says Oberman.
A reality more bloody than fiction
Of course, when Oberman and Brigid Larmour, an experienced director of Shakespeare texts, began working on the project in 2018, they could never have envisaged the play would be performed against the terrible backdrop of October 7 and its grim aftermath.
“There are no words to describe the barbarity and the horror,” Oberman says. “Beautiful young people dancing at a music festival … butchered, raped and tortured. Those kibbutzniks brutalized in the way that they were.”
Taking to the stage as Shylock and having to deliver the character’s famed call for humanity — “If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die?” — felt like “carrying a huge weight and responsibility,” Oberman says. Audiences, she adds, were often “very, very emotional.”
Oberman says the trauma of October 7 — when thousands of Hamas-led terrorists slaughtered 1,200 men, women and children in southern Israel and kidnapped 251 to the Gaza Strip — was compounded by the response outside of Israel where “very, very quickly” there were attempts to justify Hamas’s atrocities and to deny the crimes which the terror group had proudly recorded on GoPros.
“I have no problem, and I think most of the Jewish community, [has] no problem, with legitimate criticism of Israel,” Oberman says of the anti-Israel marches which have taken place regularly in British cities since October 7. “Who could not watch this terrible war unfold and not have your heart broken every day watching the news?”
However, she is deeply concerned by the tenor of many of the protests. “The same sort of banners and posters and chants that are being leveled by some on those marches are the same messages that were being thrown… [at British Jews] long before the State of Israel was established… and that’s the bit that worries me,” Oberman says.
Oberman says British Prime Minister Keir Starmer is “a good man, and I think his heart is absolutely in the right place.”
Nonetheless, she believes the government and police must do more.
“When it veers into anti-Jewish hatred… the police need to take a stand,” she says. “There needs to be clearer legislation for the police and I think there needs to be a clearer steer from government to say, ‘Every society that allows Jew hate to flourish, all other evils follow.’ The past predicates the future.”
Oberman is, for instance, appalled by last month’s protests by the far-left Palestine Action group outside the JW3 Jewish community center on north London’s Finchley Road.
“Palestine Action, mainly made up of non-Palestinians, it has to be said, were screaming and spitting in the faces of old pensioners and families trying to go to the community center and the police did nothing,” she says. “I have absolutely no doubt that unless our amazing Community Security Trust [which monitors antisemitism and protects Jewish venues] and the Met police and the government don’t sit down and start to take seriously what can and cannot be shouted out on the streets of London against Jewish people, there’s going to be a big problem.”
But Oberman is also heartened by the fact that “The Merchant of Venice” sold out “absolutely everywhere” on its previous tour, often playing to largely non-Jewish audiences.
The Battle of Cable Street, says Oberman, isn’t just about 1930s antisemitism, it is also the story of how the fascists were sent packing. When Mosley turned up at Cable Street — protected by mounted police and applauded by elements of the press — he expected the area’s working classes to join him. That calculation proved incorrect.
Oberman recalls her grandmother describing how the family’s Irish neighbors stood on the front line with them, alongside the small Afro-Caribbean community, local dockers and even Somali sailors who were in town.
“Ordinary heroes from all over the country came and joined them and said, ‘You shan’t pass. If you come for the Jews, you come for us all,’” Oberman says. “I think that that message of unity, of standing up to a greater evil, really spoke to audiences.”
Oberman’s ambitions for the show aren’t confined to what happens on stage. An education pack is available for schools and she has been visiting classrooms to talk about the play’s message.
“I always start off by saying: ‘Who’s got a strong mother, grandmother, auntie [or] sister? Take the word ‘Jew’ out of this play and imagine that was from your community and that they were standing up for you,’” she says.
“All battles really begin at home,” Oberman continues, and it is women, who are often written out of history, that are on the front lines, as so many were at Cable Street. The play, she hopes, honors them.
Ever the professional, Oberman makes a strong pitch for audiences to come and see her “Merchant of Venice 1936” — one that is both full of artistic pride and politically powerful.
“If you love Shakespeare, if you love politics, if you love history, this is the play for you,” she says. “But also it packs a very powerful punch at this minute in time, because it’s not about Israel, it’s about pure Jew-hatred. And you can see where one bleeds into the other.”
