Mark Leiren-Young’s Playing Shylock opened at Canadian Stage on Wednesday night.  It’s a one man show featuring Canadian stage, film and TV icon Saul Rubinek and directed by the equally venerable Martin Kinch.  And it’s back where it all started for both of them in what was then Toronto Free Theatre on Berkeley Street (once, appropriately enough, a gas works).

The schtick is that a run of The Merchant of Venice at Canadian Stage has been cancelled mid-performance due to hostile hashtagging etc spooking sponsor the Royal Dominion Bank of Wherever.  After all there is no sin greater than anti-Semitism, even if no reasonable person can define it precisely, so better be on the safe side.

Rubinek, of course, is playing Shylock.  It’s his dream of a lifetime to do so and as a Jew born in a DP camp in Germany to a Yiddish theatre father he reckons he has every right to play Shylock as a very Jewish Jew.  This he will explain to us discursively with pathos and humour for an hour and a half, in English and Yiddish.  The set used is the putative set (Shawn Kerwin) for the trial scene in the play appropriately enough and the performance is enhanced by clever sound design by Olivia Wheeler.

Rubinek takes us on a journey through time and space; from a post war DP camp to Toronto in the 1960s and now, to Hollywood and more.  Along the way we meet anti-semitism in casting (stage and film).  Nobody too Jewish looking can be cast in a leading role; especially Jesus Christ.  Cue nose job jokes.  We meet the Toronto Morality Squad and their Nazi allies.  We get one of the most concise arguments for why that semi-literate from Stratford didn’t write the plays that bear some version of his name.  FWIW the play favours Edward de Vere and FWIW so, for the most part, do I.  We get Shylock’s great monologue in English and Yiddish and plenty of discussion about bacon and cheese on burgers and other controversies in The Jewish Community.

It’s a wonderful performance for a man in his seventies (and he milks that for al its worth!).  Rubinek is funny, acute, awkward and very moving.  He probes the questions we tend to avoid like “what is art for?” and therefore “what is permissible in art?” and who decides that; sponsors, ticket buyers, artists, the Toronto Morality Squad, The Jewish Community?  He doesn’t push answers down our throats but tells stories from a long life in the acting profession that illuminate and throw up questions that don’t have easy answers.  It’s quite an experience.

Playing Shylock continues at Canadian Stage, Berkeley Street until November 24th unless it gets closed down sooner.

Photo credits: Dahlia Katz