In Playing Shylock, Saul Rubinek grapples with cancel culture in the arts

25:12Saul Rubinek: How Playing Shylock critiques cancel culture in the arts

In Canadian Stage's new production, Playing Shylock, the Canadian acting legend Saul Rubinek plays a fictionalized version of himself as he prepares to take on one of theatre's most controversial characters: Shylock, the Jewish moneylender in Shakespeare's comedy The Merchant of Venice.

Shylock is considered one of Shakespeare's greatest dramatic creations (despite being a fairly minor five-scene role), but the character has also long been criticized for its reinforcement of anti-Semitic stereotypes. In an interview with Q's Tom Power, Rubinek says Shylock was one of the first Jewish characters in English theatre at a time when Jews had been expelled from England for more than 300 years.

"To call the play anti-Semitic because of a bad guy Jewish character — what is anti-Semitism when there are no Jews on the street or in the schools or in homes to attack?" Rubinek says. "It made the reputations of actors in every century…. I am a Jewish actor playing this character today, which you are unlikely to see. You are more likely to see the word Jew as metaphor for whatever other is currently the most oppressed."

In Playing Shylock, Rubinek's character is a stage actor who's playing Shylock in a production of The Merchant of Venice that has the plug pulled due to its offensive stereotypes.

"At intermission, he inadvertently finds out that the play is going to be cancelled," Rubinek says. "He wasn't supposed to know till after the performance that night, after they did their final bows, but he gets so angry that this has happened. He says, 'Screw this, I'm not doing the rest of the show.' So he comes out and explains to the audience."

The one-man play is an adaptation of the 1996 play Shylock by the Canadian playwright Mark Leiren-Young. Rubinek says he and Leiren-Young met over Zoom during the pandemic.

"I suggested, 'What about if I play a character called Saul Rubinek?' And Mark Leiren-Young just jumped at it," the actor recalls. "Why would the child of survivors — which is what I am, I'm the child of Holocaust survivors — do an anti-Semitic play? Well, I wouldn't. And so that's part of my fury about why it's been cancelled."

Keeping the audience 'off balance'

Several weeks ago, on his way to rehearsal, Rubinek was listening to Q's interview with Native American playwright Larissa FastHorse. He was inspired by the stories she shared about her latest production of The Thanksgiving Play, which tells the story of four white teachers who decide to create a Thanksgiving show that won't ruffle any feathers.

In his conversation with FastHorse, Power noted that Indigenous and white audience members were laughing at different parts, and were very rarely aghast at the same time.

Rubinek says he shared that snippet of the interview with his teammates. "I said, 'I think we're going to experience something similar from Jewish people in the audience who are going to feel free to laugh, and people who are not Jewish who are going to feel uncomfortable [for] a moment and not laugh," he says. "I think that there's something really wonderful about what this Indigenous playwright just did on purpose. And I think we should think about doing it on purpose.'"

He says he believes in the importance of "keeping the audience off balance" because it "opens the mind and the heart."

"When you don't know what to expect, then I think you're ready to receive things in a different way," Rubinek tells Power. You can catch Playing Shylock now until Nov. 24 at the Berkeley Street Theatre in Toronto.

The full interview with Saul Rubinek is available on our podcast, Q with Tom Power. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

Interview with Saul Rubinek produced by Ben Edwards.