Shylock’s identity crisis
Taking the role of Shakespeare’s villain raises hard questions, reports
AIt’s almost impossible for Shylock to talk about his daughter. The thing that really kills him is she’s sold his ring
drian Schiller has spent the last few weeks at Shakespeare’s Globe in Southwark, hearing the word “Jew” spat at him. The veteran performer, who also stars on TV in Viking drama The Last Kingdom, is the latest actor to take on the role of Shylock, in Abigail Graham’s new production of The Merchant of Venice. “I think they use his name, Shylock, three times in the whole play”, Schiller, who is Jewish, observes. “Otherwise, it’s ‘Jew this, Jew that’.”
Last week, the JC’s theatre critic John Nathan considered whether The Merchant of Venice should be “cancelled”, or never again performed. Schiller takes the question seriously. “Our production is about exposing the antisemitism. It’s not about Jewishness, it’s about antisemitism. But even so, we know there will be antisemites in the audience, because there are always people who come along to Shakespeare plays not knowing the theme, and there are antisemites everywhere. And there will also be Jews in the audience, and so we know at times those Jews will feel very, very isolated, because they will be surrounded by people who are going to laugh at antisemitic tropes, to laugh at Shakespeare’s antisemitic jokes. Our job is to expose that.”
The antisemitic insults, Schiller says, “are a poison pill which we have to swallow”, but most of them are directed his way, which is hard. “You have to sort of let yourself become a mist, and just let them pass through.” He tells me that his reward is the chance to force an audience to confront its assumptions about Jews. Schiller talks in detail about the famous moment when Shylock hears news of his daughter Jessica, who has eloped
with a
Christian and stolen some of his money. “Instead of talking about her, Shylock talks about the money,” Schiller reminds me, and in antisemitic productions this moment is indeed used to suggest a man who cares more for money than his family. But as Schiller points out: “Quite deliberately, the playwright aims the grief through that lesser loss, the money, because it’s almost impossible for Shylock to talk about his daughter. The thing that really kills him in the end is that she’s sold his engagement ring. And my feeling is that this particular point in the play is an antisemitic litmus-test. If you really think that what he’s upset about is the money, you’re an antisemite.”
What Schiller and I spend most of our time talking about, however, is the raging war over identity politics in theatre, and the impact this has on Jewish theatre makers. Increasingly, actors of all backgrounds are required to share an ethnicity or sexuality with the characters they play. Theatre makers point out that they want to tell stories from a place of understanding. But the question of who gets to tell Jewish stories has exposed the problems with such a simplistic approach. This January, Maureen Lipman generated headlines after telling the JC of her concern at seeing Helen Mirren made up to resemble Golda Meir for a new biopic; she later clarified in a letter to the Guardian that only “if the ethnicity or gender of the character drives the role then that ethnicity should be prioritised, as it is now with other minorities.” As the director Adam Lenson pointed out in the JC, most Jewish theatre activists who have led this conversation “were absolutely not saying that only Jewish actors should play Jews”, but simply asking that “Jewish artists were allowed into discussions about their own stories… which can be independent from the issue of casting”.
Nonetheless, the broader theatre sector increasingly does frame minority representation simplistically in terms of casting. Yet for people of Jewish heritage, as Schiller and I discuss, the attempt to define one’s own Jewishness is fraught with complication, not least in family histories which have survived periods of hiding or “passing” in the face of oppressive regimes.
“It’s a very intrusive question — ‘are you Jewish?’” Schiller points out. “I think it’s intrusive, precisely because people will make assumptions about you based on your answer, which are not their business and aren’t necessarily true. It could be, for a man, as intrusive as, ‘are you circumcised?’”
Graham, the production’s director, approached the problem by asking actors at the casting stage to talk as much as they wished about their relationship — or not — with Jewishness, and the three actors playing Jewish characters all have some meaningful relationship with a Jewish heritage. Schiller describes himself as “a Jew, but not Jewish”, meaning that he “was brought up outside of any sort of Jewish tradition”. But, as he’s the first to admit, “we all have to make up our own language to describe ourselves”, and fitting that personal language into an agent’s casting description can be as difficult as fitting into a central idea of a Jewish community.
Part of the problem is that agents, casting websites and funding applications regularly carry checkboxes for ethnic minorities, but not for Jews. Spotlight, the industry’s central online casting database, does not have a simple search term for Jewish actors. The Arts Council England has made it a priority to support artists from diverse backgrounds, but like many public bodies, the ethnic identities it lists for applicants on its grant application system does not include “Jewish”.
Eleanor Wyld, who plays Jessica in the Globe’s production, tells me that she has been on a journey to reconnect with her own Jewish heritage in recent years. But she’s also hesitant about her own right to tell Jewish stories, and warily sensitive about stepping into space claimed by those who were raised as religious Jews. Born into a family with a strong sense of maternal Jewish culture — “it was in education, it was in food, it was in my mother’s friends” — she tells me, “I hadn’t set foot in a synagogue until I was researching Leopoldstadt”, Tom Stoppard’s recent play in which she played Nellie. “My mother was dying as I was preparing Nellie, and the two together were a big moment of coming back to something Jewish.”
Wyld’s story is not, of course, unusual. What is unusual is the sequel. “I’ve found I’ve really enjoyed developing a niche of playing Jewish women —I’m finding something more and more true to myself in doing that.” Can she signal that on casting databases, when identifying as “Jewish” isn’t a box to tick? “In my headshot, I used to be a blonde, but now I’m a brunette. It’s terrible, but casting directors still can’t imagine blondes as Jewish.” Playing Jessica, she starts the play as a brunette, but dons a blonde wig when she elopes and tries to assimilate into Christian culture. The irony is not lost on her.
The Globe’s production of The Merchant of Venice opened this week, just as the Royal Court Theatre has admitted in a report into its own failings that, “people working in theatre often feel uncomfortable in disclosing they are Jewish”. For Schiller, such circumspection isn’t just about fear of antisemitism, but genuine personal complexity and a search for nuance. Schiller compares the experience of disclosing one’s relationship with Jewishness to disclosing one’s sexuality. He compares The Merchant of Venice to It’s A Sin, the recent hit TV drama about a group of young gay friends caught up in the AIDS crisis of the 1980s. “They were very clear that everybody involved should be homosexual. Understandably. Sometimes it is absolutely relevant. But it’s perfectly possible that there was somebody who was excluded from being cast in that because they hadn’t quite worked out where they were yet.”
Finding the language to describe one’s own sense of Jewishness is complicated, too. Adrian Schiller is clear that he never wants to be asked point-blank in an audition: “are you Jewish?” “It’s a problematic question for me. And I can’t give you an answer yet. It’s also none of your business.
“And I really think that’s quite important. I mean, I’ve been told by Jews that I’m not a Jew. I’ve been told by non-Jews that I am a Jew. And vice versa. I was actually asked by a friend of mine — I said ‘I’m not Jewish’ — and he said, ‘Why are you ashamed of being Jewish?’. Where do you start with that?”