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by Mark Leiren-Young, directed by Martin Kinch

Canadian Stage with Starvox Entertainment, Berkeley Street Theatre, Toronto

October 30-December 8, 2024

“All acting is appropriation”

Playing Shylock at Canadian Stage serves two functions. One is as a return to the stage for Canadian actor Saul Rubinek, who began his career as a stage actor. The other is as a plea for tolerance, not just religious tolerance as stimulated by Shakespeare’s play The Merchant of Venice, but for tolerance of artistic expression in general. Playing Shylock is a trenchant argument against censorship, whether from the right or the left, and the ideas behind it.

The action begins as soon as you enter the Marilyn and Charles Baillie Theatre at the Berkeley Street Theatre. Shawn Kerwin’s set looks much too grand for a solo show with its parquet floor, ornate table and chairs, cracked stone wall and a large cross suspended over the stage. The wall is unsuccessfully blocking out handbill-covered walls with the word “JEW” spray-painted on them.

Chimes sounding like the bell of St. Mark’s Cathedral in Venice sound and a voice tells us how many minutes it is until Act 2 of The Merchant of Venice. The lights go down and bombastic music plays to signal the start of the act. The side door opens and Saul Rubinek appears, dressed in traditional Hasidic garb. He seems angry and signals to the stage manager to cut the music. He tells us that protests against the production have caused Canadian Stage to cancel the show halfway through. Rubinek is upset about the situation and proceeds to tell us why.

The set-up so far for Playing Shylock by Vancouver-based playwright and ecological activist Mark Leiren-Young is similar to that for his earlier play Shylock (1996). In Shylock a Jewish actor named Jon Davies holds a talk-back after the final act of Merchant in which he addresses the concerns of the community boycott of the show that has cut short its run. Davies argues that a healthy society should be able to accept plays that are challenging. In Playing Shylock, Leiren-Young’s reworking of his earlier play, Merchant doesn’t even get to its second act.

The more important difference is that Leiren-Young’s adaptation has been tailored to suit Saul Rubinek’s personal history and the nemesis of present day cancel culture. It may be powerful for a fictional Jewish actor to defend Merchant and to plead for tolerance in general but is immeasurably more powerful to have a real Jewish actor make the same arguments based on his life experiences.

Rubinek’s parents were survivors of the Holocaust. He tells us that when his parents lived in Poland his father decided to become an actor much to his own father’s great disappointment. Yiddish theatre was alive and well in Poland before World War II and the role that every male actor of a certain age longed to play was that of Shylock. Right from this point, so early in the play, those who think that Merchant is an antisemitic play will have to revise their point of view. Why would a Jewish theatre stage Merchant so frequently and why would Shylock be such a prized role if Jewish people thought the play antisemitic?

Rubinek says he was asked why any Jewish actor would want to play Shylock who is a stereotype of a Jew. Rubinek’s answer is that the questioner must not have read the play. According to Rubinek, Shylock is the first fully-rounded portrayal of a Jew in literature and argues that the actor playing Shylock has to express a wider range of emotion than does Hamlet. He says a person need only compare Shylock to Barabas, the title character of Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta (1590), to see how complex Shakespeare has made him.

Rubinek notes that a person need only read Shylock’s famous speech, “If you prick us, do we not bleed?” to see how Shakespeare, unlike many of his contemporaries deliberately highlights the essential humanity of his Jewish character. The first thing bigots deny in judging the source of their enmity is their humanity.

What Rubinek criticizes is the attempt of theatre companies that stage the play to de-semiticize the play as way of defusing the notion that the play is antisemitic. He mentions casting actors of other ethnicities as Shylock as if Shylock were only a metaphor for any oppressed people rather than a specific example of oppression as found in Venice. The word “ghetto” was first used to refer to the Venetian Ghetto.

While Rubinek is unhappy that so few Jewish actors have had the chance to play Shylock, either through the troublesome play being staged so seldom or through de-semiticizing the subject, Rubinek simultaneously extends his complaint against the woke mindset that allows actors to play only who they are. “All acting is appropriation”, according to Rubinek. Actors are meant to learn how to play characters who different than themselves. In the same way, an important aspect of theatre is that audiences come to empathize with characters who different from themselves.

Both these notions Rubinek feels are being lost because of woke strictures on delimiting the roles that certain actors can play. He notes that he is glad that more out gay actor are being cast, but he worries whether they will be restricted to playing only gay characters.

Canadian Stage claims in its Mission Statement that it is “a space for people to develop their understanding of themselves and the other”. What, then, does cancelling a play achieve except to prevent that process? And even if a 400-year-old play were antisemitic would canceling it in any way decease antisemitism in the real world? Rubinek thinks it a pity that no one will likely ever revive The Jew of Malta with its deliberately caricatured main figure because such a play, which was a huge success in its day, is a document of our history and should be discussed rather than hidden. (In fact, the Almeida Theatre in London did revive The Jew of Malta in 1999 and the RSC in 2015, and critics noted both times how Marlowe slyly makes the audience complicit in the villainous title character’s actions.)

One weakness in Rubinek’s argument about the greatness of Merchant as a play is his adherence to the so-called Oxfordian theory of Shakespeare’s authorship. This theory holds that that Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford (1550-1604), wrote the plays and poems of William Shakespeare. The rationale is that only someone of a broader education and worldly knowledge than Shakespeare is known to have had could have written Shakespeare’s plays. The chief flaw, which Rubinek does not mention, is that de Vere died in 1604 while someone named “Shakespeare” continued to have great plays produced, such as King Lear (1605) and The Tempest (1611), until 1614. The problem is that introducing the Oxfordian theory undermines the strength of Rubinek’s argument.

Rubinek gives a tremendous performance that is so natural that a person would have no idea that he had been absent from the stage for such a long period. He is perfectly at home there and he speaks as he were not even working from a script. Only lines relating to the notion that we are seeing a Canadian Stage production of Merchant that has been stopped by protesters give away the show’s fictional premise. We feel that Rubinek is somehow speaking to each one of us personally.

His anecdotes about the past are alternately satirical and moving. His recitation of passages from Merchant are clearer and more insightful than one often hears in full performances of the play. His final account of “If you prick us, do we not bleed?” in Yiddish, as his father would have spoken it if he had had the chance, is incredibly moving.

Playing Shakespeare is a play for anyone who cares about the theatre. It must be seen for its mordant critique of the threats to theatre that come from both the left and the right. It must be seen for the way it will make many people rethink how they view The Merchant of Venice. And it must be seen for Rubinek’s performance which must be the finest performance by a male actor this year. The one thing one wishes most after seeing the play is for a savvy theatre company to mount The Merchant of Venice with Rubinek as Shylock.

Christopher Hoile

Photos: Saul Rubinek. © 2024 Dahlia Katz.

For tickets visit: www.canadianstage.com.