Canadian Stage in association with Starvox Entertainment / Playing Shylock, written by Mark Leiren-Young, directed by Martin Kinch, Berkeley Street Theatre, closes Dec. 8. Tickets here.
Toronto theatre has just reclaimed one of its own.
After an absence of many years, distinguished film and television actor/director/writer Saul Rubinek has made a triumphant return to the Toronto stage, at age 76, in Mark Leiren-Young’s Playing Shylock. It is a performance not to be missed.
Background
As I understand it, during the COVID lockdown, Victoria-based Leiren-Young and Vancouver-based Martin Kinch got in touch with Rubinek about Leiren-Young’s 1996 award-winning play Shylock, that was translated into several European languages and had an impressive international run.
The play was about the Jewish community turning on a Jewish actor who was playing Shylock. Apparently, Rubinek thought it was dated.
Before going further, we should also explain who Kinch is.
Director/playwright Kinch was a formidable player in the early years of the Canadian theatre explosion. He was artistic director and co-founder of Toronto Free Theatre, a precursor to Canadian Stage. In fact, in 1972, along with co-founder Rubinek, the company mounted the very first performance at Berkeley Street Theatre. For both Kinch and Rubinek, Playing Shylock is a homecoming. Kinch currently teaches at UBC School of Creative Writing.
During the next couple of years, and many discussions later, 1996’s Shylock morphed into 2024’s Playing Shylock. It is a completely different script, although the premise is much the same. A new element is that Rubinek’s life story is embedded in the play.
Playing Shylock — The Plot and Production
Canadian Stage is supposedly mounting a production of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, but the current performance will be the last. The run has been cancelled due to pressure from the “universal Jewish community”. In the fragile, cancel culture times we live in, portraying a Jew in a bad light, and Shylock is the villain, is stoking the fires of rising antisemitism.
The stage is supposed to be the trial scene, and Shawn Kerwin’s arresting set features a large tattered cross lying horizontally above the stage. The backdrop is a ravaged wall. Venice is looking in tatters.
Heavy portentous music begins (courtesy of sound designer Olivia Wheeler), when the angry actor playing Shylock, Saul Rubinek, in the costume of an orthodox Jew (Kerwin again), stops the introductory music and halts the performance after the first act. Why bother with the second? He then proceeds to tell the expectant audience about the cancellation, and what follows is 90 minutes of pure gold.
Leiren-Young’s witty script is a mix of Rubinek’s autobiography, the history of the Jews and antisemitism, the ethos of theatre, the role of the actor, the nature of art, and the meaning of identity. The autobiographical elements are particularly compelling, as well as being, at times, very amusing.
At the heart is the controversy surrounding Shylock the character, and why actors want to play him, and why theatres are leery about mounting the play. The script makes the point that no company would ever cast a non-Indigenous, non-Black or non-Asian in roles mandated for that ethnicity, yet non-Jews are cast routinely as Shylock, more so than Jews. Is this Jew Face?
Also important is the fact that Rubinek is the child of Holocaust survivors. His father ran a Yiddish theatre company in Poland, and the Nazis cut short his dream of playing Shylock. The Rubinek character in the play also feels that he was born to play Shylock.
Sprinkled throughout are hilarious one-liners — after all, Leiren-Young has been nominated for a playwriting comedy award. One of my favourites is: “When was there never a rising tide of antisemitism? Sometime before or after Moses parted the Red Sea?”
Or, as Rubinek looks up at the cross, “The last time they put a Jew near a cross, it didn’t work out well.”
We also get snippets of Shakespeare’s own text, and, of course, Shylock’s famous speech from Act 3, Scene 1 that begins, “Fish bait!…Hath not a Jew eyes?…If you prick us, do we not bleed?”.
As Rubinek points out, in 1595, a playwright had the compassion to humanize a villain and turn him into a three-dimensional character. Or, as one literary guru remarked, Shakespeare opened a perspective on the oppressed and gave a voice to the voiceless.
This play is sophisticated heady stuff.
Rubinek’s Performance
The acting is quite remarkable because Rubinek has to pretend that there is no script, that he’s speaking off the cuff, and that is damn hard to do while looking natural at the same time. He has to indicate when a new train of thought hits him, which he does brilliantly, while making sense of a rambling parade of ideas. Clearly Rubinek and director Kinch have worked hard to make the ex-tempore nature of the monologue work.
The actor is also blessed with winning ways and inherent charm and knows how to work an audience. He is also quick on the uptake. When a phone went off, he told the audience member to put it on speaker, it might be important. Rubinek, in fact, seemed to be having great fun reacting to the audience.
Interesting Takeaways and Fun Facts from the Play
There is an attempt to prove that Shakespeare was a beard, and that the plays were really written by the Earl of Oxford.
The story is based on a true incident that happened in Venice.
The 16th century audience had never met a Jew because Edward l expelled all the Jews of Britain in 1290. It was Oliver Cromwell who invited them back in 1656. Shakespeare’s audience only knew Jews in the abstract as Christ killers.
Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta (1592) featured the typical, unrelenting, evil Jewish stereotype, which makes Shylock character’s so singular.
The great actor Richard Burbage who owned the Globe Theatre, played Shylock, which placed the villain character above the usual low clowns, and made the audience pay attention.
Elizabethan audiences used to throw oyster shells and figs at the actors if they didn’t like them or the play.
We find out the definition of the clever term “circumcised names” — Jewish artists who changed their names to not sound Jewish, such as Robert Allen Zimmerman, known as Bob Dylan.
We learn the meaning of “facting” and “shmacting” — Rubinek’s own very descriptive words for types of acting.
Canadian Stage itself comes in for a drubbing because they supposedly cancelled the play, and Rubinek reads the fake press release they sent out with relish, trashing it all the way.
A Personal Reflection
In our present day woke culture, there are a significant number of plays and films that have been cancelled, but I remember an incident from many years ago. Although I spent a couple of hours searching the web, I couldn’t find any specific details, so we’ll have to go on my memory.
The play was at Toronto Workshop Productions (where Buddies is today) and was about a Jewish Kapo — those so-called prisoner collaborators who oversaw the forced labour squads at concentration camps for the Nazi SS. Pressure from the Jewish community caused TWP to close the play.
I remember the set vividly — mounds of clothes and shoes, supposedly from Jews who had been sent to the gas chamber. I had been extremely moved by the play, particularly the tortured lead character living with the guilt.
I was angry about the closure. Jewish Kapos were a fact. You can’t whitewash history, but it did show a Jew in a bad light, and that’s not how we want to think about the Holocaust.
Final Thought
Playing Shylock brings up the question, if we don’t have plays that offend, what kind of theatre are we left with? It’s a troubling image.
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