The Merchant of Venice 1936
Malvern Theatres, Great Malvern

NONE of Shakespeare’s plays has been so highjacked by history as the play known in its own time as The Jew of Venice.  

The character who has seized the imagination of leading actors and audiences throughout the ages appears in only five scenes and speaks only 355 lines of the text, and yet Shylock has been the focus of both anti- and pro-Jewish productions for centuries.

Director Brigid Lamour’s adaptation is particularly opportune at this critical moment. 

Set, as the title establishes, in the East End in 1936, when Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists was stoking anti-semitism among sections of the increasingly dispossessed working class, Shylock, played superbly by Tracy-Ann Oberman, is a Jewish matriarch and money-lender living in an increasingly dangerous society.