YouSaid · the spoken record

Tracy-Ann Oberman

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20
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2025-06-12
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2025-06-12
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  1. “Also, I think you were such a good playwright because character is character and there is an eternal truth in relations from Stone Age to living on the moon. So I just think there's a truth in the character. So we understand their relationship. And if it's not quite in a language we get, we totally understand it. Would you agree with that?”

    2025-06-12 · Intelligence Squared · Sotheby's Talks | Shakespeare: A Man For All Time, with Tracy-Ann Oberman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  2. “A dear happiness to women They would else have been troubled with a pernicious suitor, I thank God and my cold blood. I am of your humour for that I had rather hear my dog bark at a crow than a man swear he loves me.”

    2025-06-12 · Intelligence Squared · Sotheby's Talks | Shakespeare: A Man For All Time, with Tracy-Ann Oberman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  3. “yet living is it possible disdain should die while she hath such meat food to feed it I sign your benediction. Dise itself must convert to disdain if you come in her presence.”

    2025-06-12 · Intelligence Squared · Sotheby's Talks | Shakespeare: A Man For All Time, with Tracy-Ann Oberman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  4. “If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that tell me If a Jew wronged a Christian, what is his humility? Why revenge? If a Christian wrong a Jew would What should his sufferance be by Christian example? The villainy, you teach me I will absorb. I will better the instruction.”

    2025-06-12 · Intelligence Squared · Sotheby's Talks | Shakespeare: A Man For All Time, with Tracy-Ann Oberman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  5. “Who is our Solario and the fascist maid? We turned Gobo into Mary Gobo, who was her Irish kind of maid who now works for Visanio and they're taunting her. And they say, what do you want this pound of flesh? And she says, all right, I'll tell you why I want this pound of flesh. If he defaults on this, this is why I want it. He had disgraced me, laughed at my losses, mocked at my gains, sported my bargains, called my friends, heated mine enemies, and what is reason? Huh? I am a Not a Jew eyes. Not a Jew hands organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions. Fed with the same food. Hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is. If you prick us. You tickle us You poison us And if you wrong us. Shall we not revenge”

    2025-06-12 · Intelligence Squared · Sotheby's Talks | Shakespeare: A Man For All Time, with Tracy-Ann Oberman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  6. “Another time you called me dog, and for these courtesies I'll lend you thus much money. Antonio turns around and says, rather than Tony, you want to go, Well, I didn't really mean it. It says yes, and I'll spit on you again. I'll kick thee too. And the second speech obviously is, I think, the most, you know, is one of the greatest hits, definitely in the top 10. Shylock, I can only think of her as a she now, has had her daughter run away and convert his soul and all her money. She's been followed and chased and laughed at. Nobody's helping her find her beloved daughter Jessica. Most of her money is gone. Her daughter's converted to Christianity. And the only thing she's got to hold her together is that she's got this contract with this asshole, Antonia. Excuse my language. And she's devastated. And in our production, it's on the night of Col Nidre. She's heading towards the synagogue. She's hoping people have found her daughter, the other Jews are heading into the synagogue and she sees the policeman.”

    2025-06-12 · Intelligence Squared · Sotheby's Talks | Shakespeare: A Man For All Time, with Tracy-Ann Oberman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  7. “Senor Antonio, many a time and oft in the city, you have rated me about my monies and my nuisances. Still have I borne it with a patient shrug, for sufferance is a badge of all my tribe. You called me Miss Believer Cutthroat Dog and spit upon my Jewish gabardine and all for use of that which is mine own Well then it now appears you need my help go to then You come to me and you say Shilock We would have monies You say so You who did spit your flame upon my hair and kick me as you would a stranger's dog over your threshold Money's is your suit? What should I say to you Should I not say Had a dog monies? Is it possible a dog can lend three thousand duckets or should I bend low? And in a bondman's key with baited breath and whispering humbleness say this You spat on me on Wednesday last You spurned me such a day.”

    2025-06-12 · Intelligence Squared · Sotheby's Talks | Shakespeare: A Man For All Time, with Tracy-Ann Oberman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  8. “Well, because actually, Sherlock only appears in seven scenes in the whole of this, our lucky audience. They had it for an hour and 45 minutes. It normally runs at three and three and a quarter hours. So we cut a lot of the fat off it. But these are the two big Shylock speeches. And I think the first one, Antonio is forced to come into her disgusting East End pawnbroking shop because the boy that he's in love with Bassanio needs to borrow 3,000 duckets, which we estimated was about 250,000 pounds. So it's a huge amount of money. And this Antonio has walked into her shop and said to Shylock, I want 3,000 duckets. And she goes to set up to write the bond. And he says, am I going to be beholden to you? And she puts her pen down and I'm going to, I used a Yiddish accent for my shylock because I wanted her to be an outsider. I wanted her to be different.”

    2025-06-12 · Intelligence Squared · Sotheby's Talks | Shakespeare: A Man For All Time, with Tracy-Ann Oberman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  9. “For my shylock, the thing that was mattered was that she was in a country where law and church and state is absolute. So when this idiot, Antonio, signs this contract for a pound of flesh, and it's a legally binding contract, she truly believes whether she's going to take the flesh or not, that when she gets it into an English court of law, that this contract will stand. And as many after her have discovered, church states and the law work for the rich and powerful.”

    2025-06-12 · Intelligence Squared · Sotheby's Talks | Shakespeare: A Man For All Time, with Tracy-Ann Oberman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  10. “With the fascists of 1936. And so it became a very potent rue of a female immigrant Shylock, very much an outsider. Misogyny and anti-Semitism, misogyny and racism always go together because if you hate a woman, there's nothing you hate more than an outsider woman who won't shut up. And Mosley had these wonderfully important and powerful, rather bitter and twisted fascist aristocrats as their mansions and their buildings were crumbling and as the old power balance was changing in England who better to blame it on than the outsider internationalist untrustworthy Jew. And that was where we set it. But I wanted to say honest to the tech. So I didn't want to make my shylock a particularly likable shylock. I wanted to keep it so that it became a very, you know, Shylock is not a particularly likable person. She's driven mad through grief. And, you know, if you monster somebody for long enough and tell them they're a monster and you spit on them and hate them, they become the monster that you want them to.”

    2025-06-12 · Intelligence Squared · Sotheby's Talks | Shakespeare: A Man For All Time, with Tracy-Ann Oberman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  11. “Fully expecting and having whipped up like the black shirts that he had very much like the brown shirts, whipping up this anti-Jewish hatred, he fully expected when he marched on the Jewish entity all the other working class and minority groups that they'd work with at the East End leafleting and telling them all about the evil Jews taking things from them fully expected them to march with him. Bubba, my great-grandmother, always said that on the day it was the greatest pride of her life that the Irish working class, the English working class, the small Afro-Caribbean community, Somali sailors, the Dockers, trade unionists and ordinary heroes from all over the country came down to the East End to join them 30,000 of them on the front line to tell the fascists you shall not pass. And the more research that I did into the aristocratic fans and fascists of Mosley, it became apparent that the interface of the Venetian aristocrats would merge very nicely.”

    2025-06-12 · Intelligence Squared · Sotheby's Talks | Shakespeare: A Man For All Time, with Tracy-Ann Oberman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  12. “Decorative and yet these strong, tough Jewish women in the east end of London. My great-grandmother, I had a great aunt called Machine Gun Molly, who herself was Oido, who could cut a deal in the east end of London and put the men to absolute shame. And I had another one called Sarah Portugal, who wore a slash of red lipstick and smoked a pipe. These were the sort of immigrant, these matriarchs that I grew up with. I was very lucky because Watford Palace Theatre and then the Royal Shakespeare Company allowed us to workshop it to see if it worked. Having a female Shylock with her daughter, did anything else have to change in the play other than the pronouns but also I wanted to take the Venetian aristocracy and the stories that I was brought up with for my grandmother who called England the Golden Medina was the story of the Battle of Cable Street where Oswald Mosley taught by his great friend Adolf Hitler spawned the British Union of Fascists and he took a march onto the Jewish entity of the East End in the October the 4th 1936.”

    2025-06-12 · Intelligence Squared · Sotheby's Talks | Shakespeare: A Man For All Time, with Tracy-Ann Oberman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  13. “If you took Shylock and you turned it into a single mother with a daughter, so it becomes less about a slightly creepy relationship of an obsessive father and it becomes about an immigrant woman who's come to a country with this one daughter who has survived and wants her to sort of be part of society, but he's frightened of society because she'll never be accepted. And then it became obvious that if I turned it into the story of my great-grandmother, who, like many immigrants, came over to England, she was escaping the violence and the pogroms in Belarus, nearly being beheaded and raped herself. She comes over to England and like all immigrant women who come over the very fact of survival means they have to be strong and tough and keep their families together and yet is a complete anathema to the host society. So those women were very much seen as outsiders, as slightly repulsive. They want their women to look like Diana Mitford and to be apolitical and very”

    2025-06-12 · Intelligence Squared · Sotheby's Talks | Shakespeare: A Man For All Time, with Tracy-Ann Oberman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  14. “So, I've always hated the play. Back in the Jurassic age, when I was taught at school, it was taught incredibly badly. Very much Porsche was the heroine. Antonio was the hero and the vicious evil Jew wanted his medieval like pound of flesh. I've never seen productions that I've particularly connected with. I've either seen Shylock completely pitted and a victim or I've seen him as evil and I'm not sure which I dislike more. And I've always wondered, you know, around the same time when they were putting down the statues of Coulson. And I think people like Juliette Stevenson and others were saying that the merchant of Venice should be taken out of the cannon. I thought, let's not take it out of the cannon.”

    2025-06-12 · Intelligence Squared · Sotheby's Talks | Shakespeare: A Man For All Time, with Tracy-Ann Oberman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  15. “Fail. screw your courage to the sticking post and we'll not fail. When Duncan is asleep, whereto the rather shall his day's hard journey certainly invite him, his true chamberlains will I, with wine and wesails so convinced that memory, the warder of the brain, shall be a fume, and the receipt of reason a limbeck only when in swinish sleep their drenched natures lie as in death what cannot you and I perform the unguarded Duncan what not put upon his spongy officers who shall bear the guilt of Argent Quail”

    2025-06-12 · Intelligence Squared · Sotheby's Talks | Shakespeare: A Man For All Time, with Tracy-Ann Oberman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  16. “East was it then that made you break this enterprise to me When you durst do it then you were a man and to be more than what you were you so much more a man time nor place to denad here, and yet you would make both they have made themselves, and that their fitness now does unmake you. They've given suck. Know how tender it is to love the babe that milks me. Whilst it was smiling in my face. plopped my nipple from his boneless gums. and dashed his brains up. I so sworn as thou hast entered this.”

    2025-06-12 · Intelligence Squared · Sotheby's Talks | Shakespeare: A Man For All Time, with Tracy-Ann Oberman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  17. “Was the hope drunk wherein you dressed yourself? Have it slipped since and wakes it now to look so green and pale as it did what it did so freely. From this time forth shall I account thy love. Hath thou feared to be the same in thine own actor and valour? As thou art in desire? Thou that which thou esteems the ornament of life And if a coward in thine own esteem? I dare not wait upon I would like the poor cat in the attitude?”

    2025-06-12 · Intelligence Squared · Sotheby's Talks | Shakespeare: A Man For All Time, with Tracy-Ann Oberman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  18. “When Duncan is asleep, whereto rather this hard day's journey Sungli invites him. It's two chamberlains, will I, with wine and wasail so convinced that memory, the warder of the brain, shall be a fume, and the receipt of Rusin a limbeck only. When in swinish sleep their drenched natures lies as in a death, what cannot you and I perform upon the unguarded Duncan? What not put upon is spongy officers who shall bear the guilt of our great quell”

    2025-06-12 · Intelligence Squared · Sotheby's Talks | Shakespeare: A Man For All Time, with Tracy-Ann Oberman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  19. “Beast was it then that made you break this enterprise to me? When you just do it, then you are a man. And to me more than what you were, you would be so much more than a man, nor time, nor place did then adhere, and yet you would make both. They have made themselves, and that their fitness now does unmake you. I have given suck, and know how tender it is to nurse and love the babe that milks me I would as it was smiling in my face, have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums, and dashed his brains out, and I so sworn as thou hast done to this. If we should fail We failed. Screw your courage to the sticking post and will not fail.”

    2025-06-12 · Intelligence Squared · Sotheby's Talks | Shakespeare: A Man For All Time, with Tracy-Ann Oberman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  20. “Was the hope drunk wherein you dressed yourself? Have it slept since and wakes it now to look so green and pale at what it did so freely? From this time such I account Art thou afeard to be the same in thine own act and valour as thou art in desire? Wouldst thou had that which thou esteemest as the ornament of life and live a coward in thine own esteem, letting I dare not wait upon I would like a poor cat in the added prison.”

    2025-06-12 · Intelligence Squared · Sotheby's Talks | Shakespeare: A Man For All Time, with Tracy-Ann Oberman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT