By Michael Regenstreif
The Jew of Malta, a play written circa 1590, by Christopher Marlowe, is an ugly depiction of Jewish stereotypes that reflects the ingrained antisemitism of English society in the late-16th century, a time when there had been no Jews living openly in England for three centuries following the expulsion edict issued by King Edward I in 1290.
The title character, Barabas the Jew (named, no doubt, for the thief Barabbas, whose crucifixion sentence was commuted at the time of Jesus’ crucifixion in the Christian New Testament), is a despicable caricature. Obsessed with money, he thinks nothing of committing both serial and mass murders. Barabas’ own daughter is among his many murder victims.
Playwright Marlowe was a contemporary of William Shakespeare and Barabas, apparently, inspired Shakespeare’s character Shylock in The Merchant of Venice. Shylock, believe it or not, is actually a more sympathetic portrayal of a Jewish character.
I went to see the production of The Jew of Malta presented earlier this month by the University of Ottawa Department of Theatre Drama Guild. The uOttawa production was subtitled The Ugly Face of Antisemitism and, presumably, the play was chosen to expose how ugly, irrational and senseless antisemitism is. Ironically, and most probably coincidentally, the performance dates coincided with Israeli Apartheid Week, a campus event that many feel perpetuates antisemitism as a by-product of its campaign to delegitimize the State of Israel.
The intentions of the uOttawa theatre students were certainly honourable and worthy of applause.
A slide show in the theatre lobby before the performance and during intermission called attention to historic and contemporary examples of antisemitism and to some of the people like composer Richard Wagner and automobile manufacturer (and newspaper owner) Henry Ford who were responsible for it.
Sadly, though, the production failed – both as compelling theatre and as a lesson in the evils of antisemitism.
The first problem, undoubtedly, was with the text. Marlowe did not write his play, 420 or so years ago, as an exposé of antisemitism. He wrote the play to promote his own – and his society’s – antisemitism. There is nothing in Marlowe’s words that is at all critical of antisemitism.
I suppose there are ways The Jew of Malta could be approached that could be used to expose the senselessness of antisemitism (or any kind of prejudice for that matter). One way to do it might be with a dark production that would horrify an enlightened, contemporary audience.
But that was not the approach of director Tibor Egervari, professor emeritus in the uOttawa Department of Theatre and a Hungarian Jew who lost many members of his family in the Holocaust, and his students.
They chose to present The Jew of Malta as some kind of comedy. And just as there’s nothing in Marlowe’s text that is critical of antisemitism, there’s also nothing in the text that is remotely funny. The comedy had to be found in the staging.
So, they staged it for laughs. Many of the male roles, including the lead role of Barabas, were played by women. While makeup was used to transform actress Kiersten Hanly almost effectively from the young woman she is into the old man she was playing, the high-heeled woman’s boots she wore throughout the performance broke any male spell she might have created. Most of the other actresses playing male roles made no attempts to transform their femininity.
Most of the actual men in the cast played their characters as if they were gay stereotypes who stepped right out of La Cage aux Folles despite there being no references, at all, to homosexuality. Even the male character romancing the female prostitute acts like a gay stereotype.
The cast performed throughout the play as if they were in a Marx Brothers comedy. The difference, though, is that Marx Brothers comedies were written to be funny. There’s nothing funny in the The Jew of Malta. The whole idea of the production’s approach was obvious in the opening minutes; unfortunately, the play ran two-and-a-half hours.
The end result is that the play’s extreme antisemitism was so trivialized it became completely benign. Ultimately, the production was all about sight gags for yuks. The loftier, noble ambition of exposing “the ugly face of antisemitism” was lost.
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