Of course, Bridget Lamour’s Merchant of Venice 1936 is, first and foremost, a sharp social statement. Watching it is difficult and terrifying almost the entire time—only occasionally, as if to entertain and provide a moment of respite, this ongoing statement is lit by the story of Portia (Georgie Fellows) with her riddles, caskets, and suitors. The audience begins to breathe a little and chuckles willingly—the suitors are funny, the text is amusing, and those silly little boxes!
Here, Shylock is played by a woman for the first time, actress and playwright Tracy-Ann Oberman—who is also the author of this stage adaptation. It is worth mentioning that in November 2023, Oberman joined a march against antisemitism in London, while the first premiere of The Merchant of Venice 1936 took place in March 2023. This current, second iteration has become even sharper, clearer, and harsher, while simultaneously acquiring an astonishing clarity of emotions, the kind you only experience in childhood.
The play races forward like a crazed carousel, scenes flashing by at wild speed—blink, and suddenly.
The action begins entirely unexpectedly with a Shabbat evening ritual—candles, wine, the white lace collar of Shylock’s mother, and a song—a slightly off-key but deeply homely and harmonious chorus.
And here comes the first “suddenly”—the lighting changes, people shuffle, and Antonio (Joseph Millson), who had been so carefully supported by Shylock, is suddenly swept onto center stage. Slowly, like in a nightmare, he raises his hand in a Nazi salute. A black trench coat, the raven-black wing of fear.
From this moment, the action wraps around Shylock and London’s Cable Street with an imagined barbed wire fence (a mental note: Auschwitz is only four years away).
Everything on stage is gray. Ash, dust, an unkempt street, the wall of a house—even the light-colored dresses of the women seem dusty. If hatred had a color, it would be gray. And then suddenly, a bright fascist armband slashes through the gray, catching the eye: remember, the action of Shakespeare’s play has been relocated to London in 1936, during the rise of the fascist Oswald Mosley. On the wall hangs a poster with his face.
If you’ll allow, a quick recap of the plot: A broke nobleman dreams of marrying, asks his friend, a merchant, for a loan, and the merchant borrows from a moneylender, agreeing to a savage condition—if the debt is not paid in gold on time, the moneylender has the right to cut a pound of flesh from the debtor. The merchant and moneylender hate each other so much that the deal doesn’t even seem horrific to them. Around this central conflict are love stories, a runaway from home, several proposals, women disguised as lawyers—but all this through a sarcastic, venomous lens. Shakespeare’s text is filled with the poison of unlove from cover to cover—nothing much was changed in the text here.
In fact, this entire production is about that poison of unlove, about how it seeps into every pore of the body, every crack between bricks. Here, no one loves anyone—and turning Shylock into a woman only amplifies this feeling. Madame Shylock doesn’t love her daughter Jessica (Grainne Dromgoole), forcing her to inherit the business. Jessica doesn’t love her mother and secretly runs away from home. Her fiancé, Lorenzo (Mikhail Sen), doesn’t seem particularly in love either, and when Jessica enters society, she faces ridicule and biting, revolting jokes.
And so they wander in circles, finally ending up in the courtroom, where Shylock has come to claim her debt.
There’s a flurry of activity, and suddenly Antonio is on his knees before Shylock, a button on his trench coat undone, and the point of a kitchen knife nearly touching his collarbone. They stare at each other—Shylock, looking down; Antonio, sideways, his head turned away, his neck exposed—as if making it easier for the opponent to strike. A pause hangs in the air, stretching into eternity; seconds turn into salt crystals, and the characters into pillars of salt, embodying grief.
She cannot drive the blade in; he cannot look away—not from the knife that promises pain, but from her eyes. The pillars of salt freeze in helplessness.
This scene is the pinnacle of the entire production, which had moved toward it inexorably and heavily, like Antonio’s fleet, heavily laden with gold.
And then—O deus ex machina!!—the pseudo-lawyers appear (and here too, unlove: how cleverly they deceive their suitors!). Shylock drops the knife—it falls from her slender, feminine hand, wrapped in the sleeve of an expensive robe. Antonio collapses like a rag doll, weakened by fear. Shylock stands like a beautiful mannequin—speechless and also drained, only a long string of beads swaying. The tableau ends, but their translucent silhouettes still shimmer like discarded chitin shells. Soon they will crumble with a silent crackle, swept away by a thoroughly un-Shakespearean finale.
Onstage, barricades of tables and chairs appear; no character remains on this side—they all rush to join Shylock, standing to defend Cable Street. Antonio, Jessica, Bassanio, and all the ladies and gentlemen stand shoulder to shoulder, forming a sculptural group that most resembles Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People—here’s the ancient goddess and the ordinary woman who has desperately thrown herself into defending the world.
A century separates the painting and the events of the play, and almost the same separates us from Cable Street.
Of course, this finale is wonderfully illogical. Of course, it is wonderfully fierce, unexpected, and—let’s admit it—didactic. But it works exactly as it should. After the unbearable scenes, the audience seems to exhale in relief—all that horror was just a mirage, a nightmare, and reality is here: a small group of people huddled together, chanting desperately, “They shall not pass!” And you believe—they really won’t let the darkness through. What else is there to do?
