This play has always fascinated and repulsed me and I don’t like it. I’ve never liked it.” It’s rare for an actor promoting their latest project to express revulsion. But nothing is simple for TracyAnn Oberman, playing Shylock in her own adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. How do Jewish creatives approach English literature’s most notorious antisemitic archetype? Indeed, why return to the source of so many bloodthirsty, moneygrabbing slurs?
Oberman first encountered the play aged 12. “It was taught in my school, very badly. In the playground afterwards everybody was running around, rubbing their hands, doing a ‘Jewish’ voice. It was cringe-making.” Nothing she saw as an adult reassured her. “I’ve seen productions where Shylock is mocked. I’ve seen versions where he’s a complete victim. I don’t know which is worse.”
Oberman gradually reimagined Shylock as a tough-asnails widow, informed by her own family history. At 15, her great-grandmother came to England from her Belarus shtetl. Widowhood left her “a tough single mother in London’s East End. She lived in two rooms in a tenement flat near Cable Street until she was 98.”
Oberman recalls other indomitable aunties: Machinegun Molly (“men were terrified of her”) and Sarah Portugal, who “smoked a pipe and wore a slash of red lipstick – everything that was anathema to the aristocratic English. The very thing that made them survivors also made them outsiders – too loud, too brash, too strong, too opinionated.”
This story is from the March 03, 2023 edition of The Guardian Weekly.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber ? Sign In
This story is from the March 03, 2023 edition of The Guardian Weekly.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber? Sign In
Friendship interrupted
They were best mates. Then one had a baby, while the other struggled to conceive. They share their brutally honest takes on what happens when motherhood affects friendship
KERNELS OF HOPE
During the siege of Leningrad, botanists in charge of an irreplaceable seed collection, the first of its kind, had to protect it from fire, rodents-and hunger
A new horizon' The inverse link between cancer and dementia
Scientists have long been aware of a curious connection between these common and feared diseases. At last, a clearer picture is emerging
Across the universe
Samantha Harvey won the Booker prize with a novel set in space. Yet, she says, Orbital is actually 'a celebration of Earth's beauty with a pang of loss'
Frank Auerbach 1931 -2024
Saved from the Holocaust, this artist captured the devastation of postwar Britain as ifits wounds were his own but he ultimately found salvation in painting
Seven lessons I've learned after 28 years as economics editor
Margaret Thatcher was Britain's prime minister and Neil Kinnock was leader of the Labour party.
Droughtstricken dam leaves economies powerless
A ll is not well with the waters of Lake Kariba, the world's human-made lake largest A punishing drought has drained the huge reservoir close to record lows, raising the prospect that the Kariba Dam, which powers the economies of Zambia and Zimbabwe, may have to shut down for the first time in its 65-year history.
Let this be the end of these excruciating celebrity endorsements
I wish celebrities would learn the art of the French exit. But they can't, which is why Eva Longoria has announced she no longer lives in America. \"I get to escape and go somewhere,\" she explained.
Alive, but unable to thrive under absolute patriarchy
Since the Taliban returned to power, women and girls have tried defiance, but despair at their harshly restricted lives
‘It's tragic’ Reflection in the wake of Amsterdam violence
Carrying signs scrawled with messages urging unity, they laid white roses at the statue of Anne Frank, steps away from the home where her family had hidden from Nazi persecution.