Canadian Stage in affiliation with Starvox Leisure / Enjoying Shylock, written by Mark Leiren-Younger, directed by Martin Kinch, Berkeley Avenue Theatre, closes Dec. 8. Tickets right here.
Toronto theatre has simply reclaimed one among its personal.
After an absence of a few years, distinguished movie and tv actor/director/author Saul Rubinek has made a triumphant return to the Toronto stage, at age 76, in Mark Leiren-Younger’s Enjoying Shylock. It’s a efficiency to not be missed.
Background
As I perceive it, in the course of the COVID lockdown, Victoria-based Leiren-Younger and Vancouver-based Martin Kinch acquired in contact with Rubinek about Leiren-Younger’s 1996 award-winning play Shylock, that was translated into a number of European languages and had a formidable worldwide run.
The play was concerning the Jewish group turning on a Jewish actor who was taking part in Shylock. Apparently, Rubinek thought it was dated.
Earlier than going additional, we must also clarify who Kinch is.
Director/playwright Kinch was a formidable participant within the early years of the Canadian theatre explosion. He was creative director and co-founder of Toronto Free Theatre, a precursor to Canadian Stage. In truth, in 1972, together with co-founder Rubinek, the corporate mounted the very first efficiency at Berkeley Avenue Theatre. For each Kinch and Rubinek, Enjoying Shylock is a homecoming. Kinch at the moment teaches at UBC Faculty of Artistic Writing.
Throughout the subsequent couple of years, and lots of discussions later, 1996’s Shylock morphed into 2024’s Enjoying Shylock. It’s a fully totally different script, though the premise is way the identical. A brand new ingredient is that Rubinek’s life story is embedded within the play.
Enjoying Shylock — The Plot and Manufacturing
Canadian Stage is supposedly mounting a manufacturing of Shakespeare’s The Service provider of Venice, however the present efficiency would be the final. The run has been cancelled as a result of strain from the “common Jewish group”. Within the fragile, cancel tradition occasions we stay in, portraying a Jew in a foul gentle, and Shylock is the villain, is stoking the fires of rising antisemitism.
The stage is meant to be the trial scene, and Shawn Kerwin’s arresting set options a big tattered cross mendacity horizontally above the stage. The backdrop is a ravaged wall. Venice is wanting in tatters.
Heavy portentous music begins (courtesy of sound designer Olivia Wheeler), when the offended actor taking part in Shylock, Saul Rubinek, within the costume of an orthodox Jew (Kerwin once more), stops the introductory music and halts the efficiency after the primary act. Why trouble with the second? He then proceeds to inform the expectant viewers concerning the cancellation, and what follows is 90 minutes of pure gold.
Leiren-Younger’s witty script is a mixture of Rubinek’s autobiography, the historical past of the Jews and antisemitism, the ethos of theatre, the function of the actor, the character of artwork, and the that means of identification. The autobiographical components are significantly compelling, in addition to being, at occasions, very amusing.
On the coronary heart is the controversy surrounding Shylock the character, and why actors wish to play him, and why theatres are leery about mounting the play. The script makes the purpose that no firm would ever forged a non-Indigenous, non-Black or non-Asian in roles mandated for that ethnicity, but non-Jews are forged routinely as Shylock, extra so than Jews. Is that this Jew Face?
Additionally essential is the truth that Rubinek is the kid of Holocaust survivors. His father ran a Yiddish theatre firm in Poland, and the Nazis lower brief his dream of taking part in Shylock. The Rubinek character within the play additionally feels that he was born to play Shylock.
Sprinkled all through are hilarious one-liners — in spite of everything, Leiren-Younger has been nominated for a playwriting comedy award. One in every of my favourites is: “When was there by no means a rising tide of antisemitism? Someday earlier than or after Moses parted the Pink Sea?”
Or, as Rubinek seems up on the cross, “The final time they put a Jew close to a cross, it didn’t work out properly.”
We additionally get snippets of Shakespeare’s personal textual content, and, in fact, Shylock’s well-known speech from Act 3, Scene 1 that begins, “Fish bait!…Hath not a Jew eyes?…When you prick us, will we not bleed?”.
As Rubinek factors out, in 1595, a playwright had the compassion to humanize a villain and switch him right into a three-dimensional character. Or, as one literary guru remarked, Shakespeare opened a perspective on the oppressed and gave a voice to the unvoiced.
This play is subtle heady stuff.
Rubinek’s Efficiency
The appearing is kind of outstanding as a result of Rubinek has to faux that there isn’t a script, that he’s talking off the cuff, and that’s rattling exhausting to do whereas wanting pure on the identical time. He has to point when a brand new practice of thought hits him, which he does brilliantly, whereas making sense of a rambling parade of concepts. Clearly Rubinek and director Kinch have labored exhausting to make the ex-tempore nature of the monologue work.
The actor can also be blessed with profitable methods and inherent allure and is aware of how one can work an viewers. He’s additionally fast on the uptake. When a telephone went off, he informed the viewers member to place it on speaker, it is likely to be essential. Rubinek, in reality, appeared to be having nice enjoyable reacting to the viewers.
Fascinating Takeaways and Enjoyable Info from the Play
There’s an try to show that Shakespeare was a beard, and that the performs had been actually written by the Earl of Oxford.
The story relies on a real incident that occurred in Venice.
The sixteenth century viewers had by no means met a Jew as a result of Edward l expelled all of the Jews of Britain in 1290. It was Oliver Cromwell who invited them again in 1656. Shakespeare’s viewers solely knew Jews within the summary as Christ killers.
Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta (1592) featured the everyday, unrelenting, evil Jewish stereotype, which makes Shylock character’s so singular.
The good actor Richard Burbage who owned the Globe Theatre, performed Shylock, which positioned the villain character above the same old low clowns, and made the viewers concentrate.
Elizabethan audiences used to throw oyster shells and figs on the actors in the event that they didn’t like them or the play.
We discover out the definition of the intelligent time period “circumcised names” — Jewish artists who modified their names to not sound Jewish, reminiscent of Robert Allen Zimmerman, referred to as Bob Dylan.
We be taught the that means of “facting” and “shmacting” — Rubinek’s personal very descriptive phrases for kinds of appearing.
Canadian Stage itself is available in for a drubbing as a result of they supposedly cancelled the play, and Rubinek reads the faux press launch they despatched out with relish, trashing all of it the best way.
A Private Reflection
In our current day woke tradition, there are a major variety of performs and movies which have been cancelled, however I bear in mind an incident from a few years in the past. Though I spent a few hours looking out the online, I couldn’t discover any particular particulars, so we’ll must go on my reminiscence.
The play was at Toronto Workshop Productions (the place Buddies is immediately) and was a few Jewish Kapo — these so-called prisoner collaborators who oversaw the pressured labour squads at focus camps for the Nazi SS. Strain from the Jewish group brought about TWP to shut the play.
I bear in mind the set vividly — mounds of garments and footwear, supposedly from Jews who had been despatched to the fuel chamber. I had been extraordinarily moved by the play, significantly the tortured lead character dwelling with the guilt.
I used to be offended concerning the closure. Jewish Kapos had been a truth. You possibly can’t whitewash historical past, however it did present a Jew in a foul gentle, and that’s not how we wish to take into consideration the Holocaust.
Closing Thought
Enjoying Shylock brings up the query, if we don’t have performs that offend, what sort of theatre are we left with? It’s a troubling picture.
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Paula Citron is a Toronto-based freelance arts journalist and broadcaster who hosts her personal web site, paulacitron.ca. For over 25 years, she was senior dance author for The Globe and Mail, affiliate editor of Opera Canada journal, arts reviewer for Classical 96.3 FM, and dance previews contributor to Toronto Life journal. She has been a visitor lecturer for varied cultural teams and universities, significantly on the function of the critic/reviewer, and has been a panellist on COC podcasts. Earlier than assuming a full-time journalism profession, Ms. Citron was a member of the drama division of the Claude Watson Faculty for the Arts.
