<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Of course, Bridget Lamour\u2019s Merchant of Venice 1936<\/em> is, first and foremost, a sharp social statement. Watching it is difficult and terrifying almost the entire time\u2014only 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\u2014the suitors are funny, the text is amusing, and those silly little boxes!<\/p>\n\n\n\n Here, Shylock is played by a woman for the first time, actress and playwright Tracy-Ann Oberman\u2014who 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<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The play races forward like a crazed carousel, scenes flashing by at wild speed\u2014blink, and suddenly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The action begins entirely unexpectedly with a Shabbat evening ritual\u2014candles, wine, the white lace collar of Shylock\u2019s mother, and a song\u2014a slightly off-key but deeply homely and harmonious chorus.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And here comes the first \u201csuddenly\u201d\u2014the 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n From this moment, the action wraps around Shylock and London\u2019s Cable Street with an imagined barbed wire fence (a mental note: Auschwitz is only four years away).<\/p>\n\n\n\n Everything on stage is gray. Ash, dust, an unkempt street, the wall of a house\u2014even 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If you\u2019ll 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\u2014if 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\u2019t even seem horrific to them. Around this central conflict are love stories, a runaway from home, several proposals, women disguised as lawyers\u2014but all this through a sarcastic, venomous lens. Shakespeare\u2019s text is filled with the poison of unlove from cover to cover\u2014nothing much was changed in the text here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2014and turning Shylock into a woman only amplifies this feeling. Madame Shylock doesn\u2019t love her daughter Jessica (Grainne Dromgoole), forcing her to inherit the business. Jessica doesn\u2019t love her mother and secretly runs away from home. Her fianc\u00e9, Lorenzo (Mikhail Sen), doesn\u2019t seem particularly in love either, and when Jessica enters society, she faces ridicule and biting, revolting jokes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And so they wander in circles, finally ending up in the courtroom, where Shylock has come to claim her debt.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There\u2019s 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\u2014Shylock, looking down; Antonio, sideways, his head turned away, his neck exposed\u2014as 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n She cannot drive the blade in; he cannot look away\u2014not from the knife that promises pain, but from her eyes. The pillars of salt freeze in helplessness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This scene is the pinnacle of the entire production, which had moved toward it inexorably and heavily, like Antonio\u2019s fleet, heavily laden with gold.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And then\u2014O deus ex machina!!\u2014the pseudo-lawyers appear (and here too, unlove: how cleverly they deceive their suitors!). Shylock drops the knife\u2014it 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\u2014speechless 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Onstage, barricades of tables and chairs appear; no character remains on this side\u2014they 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\u2019s Liberty Leading the People<\/em>\u2014here\u2019s the ancient goddess and the ordinary woman who has desperately thrown herself into defending the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A century separates the painting and the events of the play, and almost the same separates us from Cable Street.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Of course, this finale is wonderfully illogical. Of course, it is wonderfully fierce, unexpected, and\u2014let\u2019s admit it\u2014didactic. But it works exactly as it should. After the unbearable scenes, the audience seems to exhale in relief\u2014all 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!”<\/em> And you believe\u2014they really won\u2019t let the darkness through. What else is there to do?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This Merchant of Venice\u2014with the added subtitle 1936\u2014is pinned to the stage floor, like a model, with push pins, two scenes sharply contradicting the classic content of Shakespeare\u2019s play, yet entirely comprehensible in the context of its new interpretation. The beginning and ending transport the audience to the Battle of Cable Street\u2014a series of clashes that took place in several locations in London on October 4, 1936, when huge crowds of city residents blocked fascists from marching through the streets of East End. The play was performed in London and is now embarking on an extensive tour across the UK, with stops in cities such as Bath, Leeds, Liverpool, Cardiff, and others.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":91,"featured_media":42273,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[86],"tags":[],"type_post":[184],"column":[185],"class_list":["post-42989","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-culture","column-letters-from-the-theatre"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/londoncult.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42989","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/londoncult.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/londoncult.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/londoncult.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/91"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/londoncult.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42989"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/londoncult.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42989\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/londoncult.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/42273"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/londoncult.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42989"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/londoncult.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42989"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/londoncult.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42989"},{"taxonomy":"type_post","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/londoncult.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/type_post?post=42989"},{"taxonomy":"column","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/londoncult.co.uk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/column?post=42989"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}