REVIEW: The five-star Merchant of Venice at the RSC is a powerful and timely reminder to resist heinous propaganda
Review by Steve Sutherland: The Merchant of Venice, The Swan, until 7th October, then touring before returning to the RSC 24th January to 10th February 2024
Five stars
"Uncontrolled immigration, inadequate integration, and a misguided dogma of multiculturalism have proven a toxic combination for Europe over the last few decades... you can see it play out on the streets of cities all over Europe. From Malmo, to Paris, Brussels, to Leicester… Multiculturalism makes no demands of the incomer to integrate. It has failed because it allowed people to come to our society and live parallel lives in it. They could be in the society but not of the society. And, in extreme cases, they could pursue lives aimed at undermining the stability and threatening the security of society… The nation-state must be protected."
You’d be forgiven for assigning the above quotes to some heinous propaganda pamphlet published in Nazi Germany during the 1930s but, sadly, you’d be wrong. To our eternal shame, these are the words of our Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, addressing a meeting in Washington DC only last Tuesday in an attempt to undo the UN's 1951 Refugee Convention which outlines the rights of the displaced, as well as the legal obligations of nations and states to protect them.
Braverman went on to say that it is unsustainable to have an asylum system where, “simply being gay, or a woman, and fearful of discrimination in your country of origin, is sufficient to qualify for protection."
Sieg and indeed heil. But thank God or Allah or Mohammed or whoever that when you hit absolute rock bottom, the only way is up, and our spiritual salvation arrived in the nick of time in the unlikely shape of The Merchant Of Venice 1936, an inspirational adaption of Shakespeare which reframes the play’s troubling antisemitism by placing it in the East End of London at the time when Sir Oswald Moseley and his British Union Of Fascists, aka The Blackshirts, were actively seeking to exterminate the local Jewish population.
Devised by director Brigid Larmour and actor Tracy-Ann Oberman, this powerful production has been on tour around Britain for some time now but it’s arrival here in Stratford on the very same day as Braverman’s appalling speech could hardly have been more serendipitous. The original play is a nasty piece of business, precariously balanced between racism and humanism. On the one hand, Shakespeare seems to revel in piling on the odious slurs and Semitic caricatures, on the other there’s the beautifully moving “Prick us and do we not bleed?” speech which suggests a critique of the prevailing bias. As a consequence, it’s been a subject of heated debate down the many centuries whose side the bard was actually on. Many recent RSC shows have shifted Shakespeare into different time zones, some to more apparent purpose than others. In placing the action near Cable Street in the Autumn of 1936 when Moseley’s thugs attempted to march through the Jewish community with the blessing of the government and under the protection of the police only to be driven back and defeated by the locals who banded together - the dockers, tram drivers and various immigrant communities in unison - to see ‘em off, this Merchant grants the play a refreshing context which allows us to release our concern about where the bard’s sympathies lay and concentrate on the more pressing issues at hand.
It’s not subtle but it’s truly effective. The play has been filleted to a slick couple of hours with rapid-fire scene changes and swift, ever handsome, costume switches and, against a backdrop of racist slogans culled from the time, Raymond Coultard is grotesquely mesmerising as Antonio. He’s an aristocratic fop with a romantic yen for Gavin Fowler’s dapper Bassanio, until he horrifically evolves into a bigoted blackshirt, joining the BUF adding a sinister political heft to his personal petty hatreds. Then there’s Xavier Starr’s Gratiano, a deliberate Boris Johnson clone who represents the Bullingdon contingent at its drunken, boorish boys club worst. When he dons a blackshirt, his spouted bile and bellowed obscenities get granted the same societal mandate as Antonio's, but his stupidity threatens the capacity for even more clear and present danger. Meanwhile Hannah Moorish’s Portia is a barely disguised reincarnation of Diana Mitford, the local aristo who married Moseley, loved the Nazi’s and embraced spoiled entitlement and thoughtless privilege to an obsessive degree. All are absolutely splendid in their portrayal of how inbred prepossessions can easily be harnessed to serve an ominous mounting dogma.
Then there’s Oberman’s gender-switched Shylock, the money-lending matriarch, scorned and spit upon, vilified and vengeful, such a rich and complex creation that she seems to embody all the play’s multiple frictions and contradictions within one character. Past Shylocks have been pretty hard to take to - often portrayed as panto Jews sheerly driven by avarice. Oberman’s Shylock is a living, breathing human, riven with faults and frailties. We fully understand her insistence on the pound of flesh and we sympathise when she’s brutally wheedled out of it in the court scene and subjected to a monstrous degradation.
Shakespeare is happy to leave us with his Shylock bowed, broken and forced into a Christian conversion. Not so Larmour and Oberman. Each of the play’s Christian couples is revealed to be capable of treachery, except for Jessica, Shylock’s runaway daughter, and Lorenzo, one of the Bullingdon boys, whose cross-cultural relationship stands as a single ray of guiding light. In other words, the original play ends with the impression that everyone is as bad as everyone else whereas this new one holds out the promise that we can all be as good as one another.
Here’s something else that Braverman said on Tuesday: "I believe that the nation-state is one of humanity’s great civilising forces. It creates a shared identity and a shared purpose… Patriotism stirs people to heroism and kindness. It is the belief that we have specific obligations to others specifically because they are our fellow countrymen. And in order for nationality to be sustainable, economically, culturally and in terms of public support, it needs to encompass everyone. That, in turn, means that the country cannot grow exponentially and still maintain the harmony needed for everyone to feel that we are all in this together.”
In other words, be like me or buzz off.
It would appear her callous plan to keep the little Englanders onside and cling to power is by appearing to be the protector of our so-called culture; her methodology in tackling the dreaded immigrants to make the UK appear as cruel and undesirable a destination as the persecuting ones they seek to flee. The rewritten ending to this splendid Merchant directly combats this evil, the whole ensemble inviting the audience to join them onstage as they unite behind a banner bearing the slogan employed by the Cable Street Protesters, They Shall Not Pass, Oberman having already addressed us with the impassioned wisdom that we are at our strongest when we stand together.
It’s rousing stuff. So much so, that I’m inclined to start up one of those on-line petitions which, if you reach 100,000 signatures or so, it requires the government to debate the plea. What I propose is that we make 4 October, the date of the Battle of Cable Street, an official annual commemoration in recognition of its significance in symbolising the power of multicultural harmony. In fact, it can replace November 5 in the calendar of events as that’s a celebration of Guy Fawkes being thwarted from blowing up Parliament which, let’s face it, doesn’t sound too dumb an idea right about now.
