Review: Playing Shylock is a ghost story that is impossible to ignore | Canada Voices

Title: Playing Shylock

Written by: Mark Leiren-Young

Director: Martin Kinch

Actors: Saul Rubinek

Company: Canadian Stage in association with Starvox Entertainment

City: Toronto

Year: Runs to Nov. 24, 2024

Critic’s Pick

At its heart, Playing Shylock is a ghost story.

When actor Saul Rubinek stammers into the Berkeley Street Theatre, he carries the hollow expression of someone who’s survived something. “Cancelled,” he sputters, staring into the abyss of his phone, dressed in a yarmulke, tzitzit and long coat. Curly payos, or side curls, dust the sides of his face.

“Cancelled,” he repeats, the word carrying new heft.

Immediately, the phantoms come out to play. Mark Leiren-Young’s blistering script imagines a production of The Merchant of Venice cut off at intermission due to concerns of antisemitism from local protestors. Rubinek plays a heightened version of himself, a Jewish actor thrilled to dig into the controversial role of Shylock, to engage with the moneylender’s infamous “pound of flesh.” He’s waited his whole life to play this role, he tells us.

But there won’t be a second half of The Merchant of Venice. The production is a lost cause, a casualty, a spectre. Rubinek’s on his own, a titan of theatre, film and television with nothing left but an empty stage, above which floats a scorched cross (Shawn Kerwin’s set design is thoughtful and sharp).

So, in the absence of Shylock, we get the next best thing: Rubinek. In 90 minutes or so of bracing, transformative theatre, he recalls the pits and peaks of his career, from working at the Toronto Free Theatre (and watching it evolve into the decidedly not-free Canadian Stage) to acting in dozens of roles across screens big and small.

Each story comes back to being Jewish in some way; we learn about Rubinek’s parents, Holocaust survivors, and in particular his father, a Yiddish actor who never got to step into Shakespeare’s iconic role.

Indeed, Playing Shylock is a ghost story. It’s a requiem for the Jews who never got to act on a major stage, but it’s also a remembrance for the Jews who never got to become anything at all. Rubinek lashes out at mediatized phrases like “rising antisemitism” — when was antisemitism not rising in Canada? He recalls his father suggesting he pursue a name change and a nose job; he recreates conversations with Kinch, in which he realized as a young man that he’d never be a leading man at the Stratford Festival; he shares the details of his parents’ survival of the Holocaust.

My maternal grandfather was lucky; he got to be someone. At five feet and a handful of inches tall, with big ears and bushy eyebrows, he looked quite a bit like Rubinek. After growing up in New York City in the 1930s and 1940s, he evolved into a newspaperman-turned-Hollywood executive. He was quiet about his Jewishness, but it was there.

In Playing Shylock, Rubinek jokes that most Hollywood agents are Jewish; “just because it’s a stereotype doesn’t mean it’s not true,” he quips. Another ghost invoked on the stage of the Berkeley Street Theatre, my papa. Another Jew I wish could have lived long enough to soak in the verve of this show.

Intermittently, Rubinek reminds us that this isn’t your standard autobiographical solo show; there’s a frame, this fictional, cancelled production of The Merchant of Venice, this arm’s-length gap between the Rubinek we see onstage and the Rubinek who worked with Leiren-Young and director Martin Kinch to polish Playing Shylock. There’s plausible deniability that the lines Rubinek says are just that, and yet there’s also no doubt that Rubinek feels Playing Shylock to his very core.

And speaking of cancelled productions, it’s impossible to ignore the other ghosts writhing in the ether of Playing Shylock. Earlier this year, a production of Christopher Morris’s The Runner was cancelled by Victoria’s Belfry Theatre due to tensions pertaining to the conflict in Gaza. And in late October, Canadian Stage’s own 1939 found itself at the centre of an uncomfortable scandal — its play about residential schools may not have been written by an Indigenous playwright after all. Playing Shylock doesn’t name either of those shows, but it doesn’t have to; the metatheatrical controversy adds a compelling, crackling layer to Rubinek’s testimony.

Playing Shylock is one of Canadian Stage’s braver programming choices in recent memory, and in a Canada whose synagogues have had to hire ‘round-the-clock armed guards, it’s not unlikely the play will cause a stir. But Leiren-Young’s script anticipates cancellation; in fact, it almost welcomes it. No, Rubinek isn’t playing Shylock at Canadian Stage — he’s doing something far more important.

In the interest of consistency across all critics’ reviews, The Globe has eliminated its star-rating system in film and theatre to align with coverage of music, books, visual arts and dance. Instead, works of excellence will be noted with a critic’s pick designation across all coverage. (Television reviews, typically based on an incomplete season, are exempt.)