I went to Watford the other night. Because I just ‘neeeeded’ culture and Watford’s the obvious place to find it. Innit? Well it was on Saturday night for a new production of… Merchant of Venice!

So they shipped Shylock over from Venice to… Cable Street, London E1. And during the move he left 17th Century Italy for 20th Century East End slum. And in the transition, Mr Shylock became Mrs Shylock. You can do that with Shakespeare. You can ‘contemporise it’, you can ‘gender reassign it’, you can do, pretty much, what’cha fucking want. It’s a play, it’s a fiction, it therefore has no absolute reality other than how any particular director chooses to interpret it. (According to The Matrix- blessed be it- nothing has an absolute reality anyway, but that’s another conversation). The only thing you can’t do is change the words. Translate them from ‘Shakespeare’ to ‘English’. If you do that its called West Side Story. Not a bad thing, arguably a very very good thing, but no longer entitled to the Shakespeare label.

And thus did actress Tracey-Anne Oberman move the ancient money-lender to Whitechapel in 1936. Why there and then? Because that was the inflammatory scene of the absolute pinnacle of British antisemitism, when ‘blackshirts’ under Oswald Moseley chose to march in full, pretty-much Nazi regalia, through the streets of London’s foremost Jewish ghetto. The police not only allowed this to happen, but decided, collectively, to stand back and make no intervention when the inevitable riots ensued. The blackshirts were blocked from their march as tram-drivers ‘parked’ their trams to obstruct, then hoardes of dockers arrived to stop them as well as thousands of local Jews intent on disrupting Sir Oswald. And rather successfully as the Nazi scum eventually were forced away. The event representing the end of official British anti-semitism right there and then. As many European countries, like Spain, Italy, Austria were embracing their Hitler-vibe, Moseley lost so much face at Cable Street that the blackshirts never gained the political traction they had appeared to be gaining before.

So that’s where ‘we’ set Merchant of Venice. And it was ok. Wasn’t brilliant but it was ok. Tracey-Anne herself played Shylock and quite well. Dressed in the ‘Jewish gaberdine’ of a 1930s Brit rather than a 1650s Eye-tie. Just not quite sure the merger of the two periods worked sufficiently well to do anything worthwhile.

Happy tuesday

A xxxx