Is antisemitism why so many in the theatre world love The Merchant of Venice?

The argument in the play’s favour was most recently put by Oxford University’s Professor of English Literature, Seamus Perry. In a Radio 4 programme about the pressure from social media on today’s novelists to cause no offence to vulnerable groups, Perry stood up for Dickens’s Fagin, saying that although the character is brimful of antisemitic tropes, “there is something so odd, perplexing and complicated about Dickens’s imagination...that by the time Fagin is sitting in his condemned cell waiting for execution the moral centre of the novel is completely up in the air.” It’s the same for The Merchant of Venice, says Perry.

I agree. But a play is different from a book, which is historical document preserving an author’s voice and usually something of the time in which it was written. Plays reflect the moment in which they were written but also the time in which they are performed. The very act of performance can be an affirmation – celebration, even – of its content.
This is not to say a production celebrates the murder in its plot, but the world a show depicts is usually offered up as a truth, which is why great care is needed if you perpetuate it and the racial stereotypes within it. This one values his ducats more than his daughter.

Still, better to offend than to censor. If a production can justify the racism in a play, then let it. If it can’t then its failure, and that of its director, will be on full view. Yet that tolerance is today wearing thin.

In Perry’s acknowledgment of the 19th and 16th century antisemitic contexts in which Dickens and Shakespeare created Fagin and Shylock, there is no consideration of the way these works might affect Jews here and now - when Shylock-like tropes about controlling, money-motivated and murderous Jews are in the minds of modern antisemites such as activist Tahra Ahmed who called the Grenfell calamity a “Jewish sacrifice”, or Malik Faisal Akram who flew from the UK to Texas to shoot Jews in a synagogue, or even the likes of congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene who blamed California wild fires on Jewish space lasers.

We can never let these people decide what plays we watch. Yet during 20 years' worth of Merchants (the period I have been reviewing) there has been little evidence that the (often gentile) directors of Shakespeare’s Jewish play ever wondered what it is like for a Jewish child to sit with his or her non-Jewish peers as they watch Shylock bearing his conspicuous kippa and knife, approach a bound victim with a bared torso.

I can’t know that they didn’t think of this. But if they did they presumably calculated that any such collateral casualty is worth the good created by their theatrical vision.

I think it was with Rupert Goold’s characteristically brilliant 2011 production of The Merchant of Venice when I finally abandoned hope that the play can ever be an edifying watch. As in many productions, the period and setting was modernised so we might better recognise the people in it. Though also like most productions, this familiarising quality was not applied so much to Shylock (Sir Patrick Stewart) who at heart was your orthodox, kippa-wearing, formal Jew.

In this setting - Vegas instead of Venice - it seemed odd to accentuate Shylock’s otherness instead of diminishing it, and odder still when Stewart put on a kippa, shrouded himself in a talit and did a spot of davening while sharpening his knife. I mean, what exactly was that supposed to be - the well known Jewish prayer for killing a Christian?

It was then that I realised Shylock’s revenge will probably always be seen as Jewish rather than human.

The playwright Sir Arnold Wesker, who wrote a response to The Merchant of Venice called Shylock, once told me that antisemitism lay behind the British theatre establishment’s apparent love of the play. That’s harsh, but not necessarily wrong in all cases.

For all the good intentions behind the many productions of Merchant over the years, it has long felt to me that the way Jews feel about they way the are depicted on stage gets the least consideration, even when Shylock is played by a Jew.

I don’t go so far as Stevenson and call for the play to be cancelled. But I do say a director needs a bloody compelling vision to justify reviving it; the kind that has been absent in all the productions I have seen.