The Merchant of Venice 1936 review – Shylock takes on Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts

In Tracy-Ann Oberman and Brigid Larmour’s re-envisioned production, Shakespeare’s merchant is living in 1930s east London amid the rise of Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts. Smashed glass off stage foreshadows the battle of Cable Street in 1936 though there are also echoes of Kristallnacht in the intermittent sound.

At the centre stands Oberman’s Shylock, the Jewish moneylender who demands “a pound of flesh” from Antonio (Raymond Coulthard) to exact justice and is punished with a forced conversion to Christianity as part of the play’s rather contrived happy ending. Antonio is a Blackshirt while Portia (Hannah Morrish) is a Mitford-style socialite. Both are charming aristocrats, coolly chilling in their amicability.

This Shylock is a matriarch and pawnbroker, dignified and steely, who is spat upon and verbally abused by powerful men on the street and has antisemitic graffiti daubed on her house. Those threats and assaults carry a gendered menace. Oberman plays the role with a righteous anger and great inner strength. Her demand for flesh seems less driven by simple vengeance and more an outraged response to Mosley’s campaign of antisemitic persecution – as well as a single mother’s fearful defence against the rising forces conspiring to render her powerless. “If you prick us, do we not bleed?” sounds like a plea not only for tolerance but for sanity against the fascist madness around her.

Simon Godwin situated his recent National Theatre production of Much Ado About Nothing in a similar yet indistinct era but the ideological underpinning here is much more rigorous, informing story and character, and showing both afresh.

Larmour’s adaptation is slickly paced, with the verse sounding almost modern. With striking period costumes (silk dresses, suits) and sleek set designs, Liz Cooke creates a clandestine, almost noirish, candlelit atmosphere, along with elegant strains of piano music (composed by Erran Baron Cohen). This could almost be a Noël Coward play or an Agatha Christie adaptation.

Related: ‘Is it antisemitic? Yes’: how Jewish actors and directors tackle The Merchant of Venice

The courtroom scene powerfully shows political conspiracy and a thuggish corruption of the law, Portia’s “quality of mercy” speech rich with perverse irony. If this scene ever meant to pit Christian mercy against Old Testament Jewish vengefulness, it is exposed as a hollow sham. Shylock’s definition as an “alien”, as stated in court, sounds all the more sinister in this context. Her forced conversion is shocking as she swallows tears and concedes to the order with the words “I am content”.

There are some weaker aspects: Shylock’s daughter, Jessica (Gráinne Dromgoole), who betrays her, is too much a cypher and the mother-daughter relationship seems undercharged, while the back-screen projections revealing facts behind Mosley’s British Union of Fascists are heavy-handed. But these are quibbles in an impactful production that shows how an ideologically problematic text can be staged while serving as its own critique.

• At Watford Palace theatre until 11 March, then touring.