The Royal Shakespeare Theatre and the Swan theatre are set to stage two of the most well-known ‘Jewish’ plays. Tim Martin explains why engaging with their content is more necessary than ever.
In a Britain where more attacks on Jews were recorded last year than at any other point in the previous three decades – and where only last week there was a vile apparently antisemitic attack on a synagogue in North London – do we really need twin productions of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice and Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta? The answer, given in a slowly warming rehearsal room at Glasshill Studios in Southwark, where the energetic RSC directors Polly Findlay and Justin Audibert are chatting between bites of lunchtime salad, is an emphatic “yes”.
“It’s almost unbearably relevant,” says Findlay, who directs the Israeli Arab actor Makram Khoury in a contemporary-dress Merchant of Venice at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre this May, “and more precisely so now than it has been in some time.”Keep reading on The Telegraph
In a Britain where more attacks on Jews were recorded last year than at any other point in the previous three decades – and where only last week there was a vile apparently antisemitic attack on a synagogue in North London – do we really need twin productions of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice and Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta? The answer, given in a slowly warming rehearsal room at Glasshill Studios in Southwark, where the energetic RSC directors Polly Findlay and Justin Audibert are chatting between bites of lunchtime salad, is an emphatic “yes”.
“It’s almost unbearably relevant,” says Findlay, who directs the Israeli Arab actor Makram Khoury in a contemporary-dress Merchant of Venice at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre this May, “and more precisely so now than it has been in some time.” Keep reading on The Telegraph