Three Plays in Conversation
Shylock occupies an uneasy place in the theatrical canon.
He was a product of the cultural imagination of the time, imagined by Shakespeare more than 300 years after the expulsion of Jews from England and roughly 60 years before their formal readmission.
Although Shakespeare had almost certainly never met a Jew, he nevertheless created a character who has sparked debate for hundreds of years and remains a flashpoint for questions of antisemitism, identity, memory and representation.
The idea to present this triptych of plays comes from Saul Rubinek, one of Canada's great actors who began his career at the Stratford Festival in the 1960s. Following the highly successful Toronto and Off-Broadway runs of Playing Shylock, Rubinek became passionately interested in having the one-person show play alongside Merchant.
The addition of Rubinek's new play, All in the Telling, creates a still more compelling arc for the grouping: from a Jewish character imagined from outside Jewish experience, to a contemporary Jewish actor confronting that portrayal, to a Jewish playwright drawing upon his own family's history.
In The Merchant of Venice, Rubinek takes on a character who has inspired discomfort, argument and reinterpretation across four centuries. The play asks audiences to grapple not only with Shylock himself, but with the society that shapes him and the shocking fate that ultimately befalls him.
Playing Shylock brings the discussion into the present. Rubinek portrays an actor who learns that his production of The Merchant of Venice has been cancelled and responds with a searching, deeply personal and often funny examination of Shylock, antisemitism, artistic freedom and the responsibilities that come with telling difficult stories.
All in the Telling moves to lived experience. Drawing on Rubinek's experience as the son of Holocaust survivors in Poland, it explores family memory, inherited trauma, intergenerational conflict and the way Jewish identity is preserved, reshaped and carried forward.
Together, the plays explore not only how Jewish identity is portrayed or remembered, but how it endures.