In 2024, is Shakespeare’s Shylock, a role loaded with anti-Semitic interpretation and fraught history, best left on the page?
Or is it precisely the type of character that actors and audiences need to be wrestling with – right up on the stage – in order to challenge and deepen our perceptions of art and identity?
Playing Shylock, written by Mark Leiren-Young and currently playing at Canadian Stage, asks this question. More accurately, it embodies the question in the person of legendary Canadian Jewish actor Saul Rubinek. Rubinek’s complex backstory uniquely qualifies him to carry the ambitious production as its star and subject. He was born in a refugee camp in post-WWII Germany to a father who ran a Yiddish repertory theatre company there. After relocating to Canada, Rubinek rose to prominence acting on stage and screen, and eventually as a writer and director. Playing Shylock intertwines this real-life journey with the central premise of Leiren-Young’s earlier monologue play Shylock, in which a performance of The Merchant of Venice has been “cancelled” mid-performance.
When the play opens, a stunned Rubinek, dressed as Shylock, enters to explain to us that, because of sundry acts of criticism and cowardice, we will not have the chance to see the second half of The Merchant of Venice that we were expecting. Rubinek – as both actor and subject of the play – has a lot on his mind. As he stalks the stage and the words tumble out, we come to learn that he was seeking to honour his roots and his father’s legacy in the Yiddish theatre by wrestling with the thorny legacy of Shylock — a contentious portrayal that challenges actors and audiences to confront uncomfortable truths about cultural identity.
Meditating aloud on the subject, Rubinek is by turns acerbic, angry, wistful, droll and defiant. Along the way, he shares observations drawn from his real-life work on shows like The Marvellous Mrs. Maisel and Hunters, and tosses off asides referencing real-life collaborators and colleagues from Tarantino to Shatner. And with wry humour, he unpacks his personal history – and that of Director Martin Knelman – with Toronto Free Theatre, the company which evolved into Canadian Stage – which makes this production feel like an especially potent, if ostensibly thwarted, full-circle moment.
The stunning set by Shawn Kerwin gives substance to the (fictitious) idea of a production of The Merchant of Venice that has been “cancelled” mid-performance after a censorious outcry. Rubinek explains that this production was set in a world that, perhaps like our own, feels like it is falling apart. In keeping with this conceit, the stage backdrop features graffiti and detritus – and suspended over it looms the blasted frame of a massive wooden cross. Once canvas-covered, the hollowed-out cross hangs like some religious magnifying glass, silently framing the ideas and actions under discussion below.
Ultimately, Playing Shylock reaches beyond Rubinek’s personal desires and biography to meditate directly on the purpose and challenge of art itself. Through a blend of introspective gravitas and humour, the play gnaws at the tension between truth and sanitization in creative expression, and forcefully rebuts the impulse of the question of who can or should write or play a certain role. At one point, Rubinek offers the bald observation, “All art is appropriation” – pushing audiences to reflect on the perils of rushing to judgment with art that speaks to painful histories or raw societal divides.
Rubinek is simply magnetic in carrying this production that keeps us off-balance – and always thinking – from start to finish. He analyzes The Merchant of Venice, assessing the motivations and meaning of the actions and attitudes of Shylock, Antonio and Portia – and even challenges Shakespeare’s authorship of the play. But at the same time, the copious details drawn from his personal biography, delivered with such trenchant and heartfelt-seeming sentiment, make the premise of Playing Shylock—a cancelled production that never existed, and criticism that was never actually levelled—feel more and more unsettling.
Rubinek makes an eloquent, impassioned and persuasive case against censorship . . . but by the end, his arguments against the injustice of his show’s cancellation feel almost surreal. They force us to question the motivations and boundaries of not just the original Merchant of Venice, but of Playing Shylock. Does the play’s arresting “straw man” premise bring helpful clarity, focus and urgency to the play’s central subject. . . or does it subvert Rubinek’s powerful insights and arguments?
Canadian Stage’s engrossing production – which artfully merges Rubinek’s life story with the thorny complexity of the role of Shylock — asks us to sit with this uncertainty, as we look deeply into the mirror of art. For it is the job of art to confront and to challenge us. And however destabilizing the experience, it is our job as audiences not to cancel it, or look away from it – but to lean in.
Playing Shylock continues until November 10, 2024 at the Berkeley Street Theatre. For tickets, please visit canadianstage.com.
© Scott Sneddon, Sesaya Arts Magazine, 2024
