The Merchant of Venice 1936 by Watford Palace Theatre (review)

Reviewed by: The Merchant of Venice 1936by Watford Palace Theatre Joshua Freedman The Merchant of Venice 1936Presented by Watford Palace Theatre. 2702– 1103 2023. Adapted and directed by Brigid Larmour. Set and costume design by Liz Cooke. Music composed by Erran Baron Cohen. Lighting by Rory Beaton. With Tracy-Ann Oberman (Shylock), Raymond Coulthard (Antonio/Arragon), Hannah Morrish (Portia), Adam Buchanan (Bassanio), Gráinne Dromgoole (Jessica), Priyank Morjaria (Lorenzo/Maharajah), Jessica Dennis (Nerissa/Mary), Xavier Starr (Gratiano/Police Constable), and Alex Zur (Homeless Military Veteran British Union of Fascists/Yuval/Duke). The Watford Palace Theatre's production of The Merchant of Venice 1936relocated Shakespeare's mercantile comedy to the 1930s and London's East End. Director Brigid Larmour's adaptation was overtly revisionist, cut heavily in order to foreground and reinterpret the play's Jewish characters, taking a play which has historically and critically been recognized as problematic in its portrayal of its Jewish characters and layering it with references to real Jewish experiences. Erran Baron Cohen's music epitomized this desire to represent Jewish life effectively: in addition to his original piano score, well-known Jewish melodies (such as Samuel Goldfarb's melody for the Sabbath prayer, "Shalom Aleichem") sounded from the theater's speakers. Partially thanks to this inclusion of genuine aspects of Jewish culture, I found the production raised new questions about the play's antisemitism: in bringing early modern antisemitism into conversation with its more recent versions, it asked whether the play could be recuperable through adaptation. The production invited the audience into the play world, not only through firmly establishing the cultural milieu of early-twentieth-century Jewish London, but also by creating an immersive atmosphere. Seating on the stage offered an especially absorbing experience for some, yet even for those sat beyond the proscenium arch, the actors' entrances through the audience provided a similar sense of involvement in the play's action. This involvement was a double-edged sword: it brought the audience into Shylock's community, but also made them complicit in the play's antisemitism. With the divide between actors and audience made so unstable, it became much harder for viewers to distance themselves from the increasingly horrific treatment of Shylock at the hands of the play's non-Jewish characters. Larmour's main revision of Shakespeare's text was to frame the production around the Battle of Cable Street (referenced by the addition of "1936" to the play's title), a march by the British Union of Fascists (BUF) End Page 96through London's East End on 4 October 1936 which was ultimately repelled by Jewish residents and anti-fascist activists. In weaving this historical instance of antisemitism into Shakespeare's fictional narrative, the play's bigotry was made more concrete. Shakespeare's play contains very few local details of Venice itself, and some fairly crucial historical features of early modern Venetian and Jewish life are conspicuously absent. Just as Shakespeare maps the mercantilism of early modern England onto that of Venice, the Venetian and English antisemitism of the play transferred easily to Larmour's setting of 1930s London, the site of a different kind of anti-Jewish prejudice, with Venice functioning as a placeholder for London (as it does in the original text). The production addressed Shakespeare's limited historical accuracy with its deep attention to detail of its chosen period, allowing Jewish characters to exist as fully developed members of a real-world culture rather than Shakespeare's stereotypes. The production opened with an extratextual scene of Shylock (Tracy-Ann Oberman, playing a gender-flipped version of the character based upon her own great-grandmother) celebrating the first night of Passover with her family, played by the full main cast of nine actors. Unlike Shakespeare's text, which opens with the eponymous merchant, Antonio, this production prioritized the introduction of the Jewish matriarch, establishing Shylock as the character with whom audience sympathies should lie. In a recent interview I conducted with Larmour, she described how this scene was crucial in setting the tone of the play. While she had initially thought to begin the production in "a fascist meeting hall," she came to...