The touring production of The Merchant of Venice 1936 has been targeted by anti-Semites, its star has revealed.
Tracy-Ann Oberman, who has starred in “Doctor Who” and “Friday Night Dinner”, says the tour of the Shakespeare play has been forced to hire security after a surge in anti-Semitism prompted by the war between Hamas and Israel.
“We’re on a 10-week tour and I’ve been moved beyond words by the reactions of audiences and critics. But last week the production had to have security around to keep an eye on things. It’s like a dystopian nightmare,” Oberman wrote in The Spectator. “A Jewish actress doing a play about anti-Semitism that has to be secured because of Jew-hating extremists. As one reviewer said: ‘Written in the 1600s, set in 1936, as relevant today as it was in 2023. Isn’t that the truth?
“Since the Hamas terror attack on Israel, with its pogrom-like brutality against babies, women and girls, including rape and burning alive, I have felt broken. On stage, when I say the lines ‘When you prick us, do we not bleed? When you tickle us, do we not laugh? When you poison us, do we not die?’ I cry for all the innocent victims and I know that we must stand together against an evil that wants to tear us apart. And the audience cries too,” Oberman added.
“The Merchant of Venice 1936, directed by Brigid Larmour, is set in London’s East End in the 1930s. Tensions are running high and Shylock (played by Oberman), a resilient single mother and hard-working businesswoman, is desperate to protect her daughter’s future. When charismatic merchant Antonio (Gentleman Jack’s Raymond Coulthard) comes to her for a loan, a high-stakes deal is struck.
Oberman wrote that she based her Shylock on three matriarchs in her family, one of whom had escaped pogroms. She added that the great-aunt who escaped pogroms thought England was a safe place until the arrival of Oswald Mosley, founder of the British Union of Fascists. “In October 1936 she watched as Mosley and his private militia put up poster after poster and pamphlet after pamphlet about the slippery, alien, untrustworthy Jew who was not welcome on England’s shores,” Oberman wrote.
Referring to Shylock’s infamous “pound of flesh” demand in the play, Oberman says the character “became synonymous with the devilish, money-obsessed Jew”. In the current adaptation of the play, “Shylock still represents the other, the instigator of the unchristian vice of money-making. But she is neither a pure villain nor a victim,” Oberman writes. “She is a woman whose generational trauma and own experiences have so brutalised her that she has become the monster she is constantly accused of being”.
