Tracy-Ann Oberman interview: ‘People need to leave their traumas and triggering at the theatre door’
The actress Tracy-Ann Oberman is not afraid to speak her mind. Yet she has become increasingly wary of inadvertently saying the wrong thing. “Someone said to me the other day we are all a hair’s breadth away from being cancelled,” the Friday Night Dinner star tells me. “Everyone is very scared of what they can and can’t say. There is a real feeling of self-censorship.” She’s so anxious not to accidentally trigger uproar on Twitter, she repeatedly checks herself throughout our interview. “Scrap that, I didn’t mean that,” she says, more than once. “Argh, it’s so difficult! What I meant to say was this.”
Her sensitivity is understandable: Oberman has suffered so badly at the hands of the social-media haters that in 2019 she launched a podcast, Trolled. Yet in her case the vitriol was not a result of a careless tweet but because of her stance against anti-Semitism in the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn. Oberman is Jewish, and in 2019 she and the Countdown presenter Rachel Riley took legal action against 70 individuals who had harassed or libelled them on Twitter, with much of the abuse heavily sexualised and misogynistic. “David Baddiel also spoke out, but the responses Rachel and I got were fetishised and really personal,” she says. “It made me realise there was a real crossover between anti-Semitism and misogyny. [Racists and anti-Semites] don’t like mouthy women, and they certainly don’t like women with opinions who won’t go away.”
When it comes to anti-Semitism, Oberman is definitely not going away. The actress known to millions of viewers of a certain age as Chrissie Watts from EastEnders has spent a fair part of this year drawing on her trolling experience for her role as Shylock, the much abused Jewish money-lender in her new touring version of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice: one of the most controversial plays in the Western canon. Oberman recasts Shylock as a single mum in 1930s east London during the time of Oswald Mosley’s infamous march down Cable Street with his fascist Blackshirts and believes that the play’s anti-Semitism hits home much harder if its target is a woman.
“My Shylock isn’t particularly likeable – she’s neither a victim nor guilt-free. Yet when you see her standing in an entirely male court, with even Portia dressed up as a man, and watch the men turn on her, you realise just how much they go above and beyond what needs to be done.” Does she think the play is anti-Semitic? “I don’t think Shakespeare was anti-Semitic, but he was a populist writer and he knew what his audiences wanted to see.” I suggest the Christians behave so appallingly, one could possibly argue the play also stands as a critique of Christianity. “In a modern interpretation, yes. Shakespeare is such a clever writer, if you look closely at this play it doesn’t contain a single redeemable character.”
Merchant, which visits the RSC later this month (the tour also includes a stint in November at Wilton’s Music Hall, which sits cheek-by-jowl with Cable Street, where Oberman’s immigrant great-grandmother helped man the barricades against Mosley) is a typically gutsy project from an actress who combines natural warmth with a furious energy. Ever since graduating from Central School of Speech and Drama in the early 1990s and going straight into the RSC, where she stayed for four years, Oberman has spent her career “smashing glass ceilings”, as she puts it, by refusing to stay in one box. “To be more than one thing was frowned upon back then. It was impossible to get seen for a TV job if you’d been with the RSC because you were seen as a stage actor.”
Keen to work in comedy as well as write, she studied stand-up at City Lit with a view to creating her own comedy at a time when female stand-up comedians were extremely rare. “There was French and Saunders and the Comedy Club, and Ruby Wax. And that was it.” Over the next two decades, she zigzagged between classical theatre and TV, before becoming a household name as Chrissie Watts: in February 2005, more than 14 million people watched her murder her husband Dirty Den in a fit of vengeful fury.
Soap operas, she says, have always understood that the big socio-political battles are often fought at home. “You get terrific female parts in soaps: it’s the one art form in which the matriarch dominates. You don’t have to be stunningly beautiful or kowtow to the husband. You drive the story.”
She believes much has improved for female actors over the past 30 years. “When I think of the industry I went into, I never saw a man fighting to be heard in a room, having to justify his choices or be accused of being difficult. Women were decorative – you had to go along with being that joke, otherwise you were seen as a poor sport.”
It’s hard to imagine Oberman ever settling for decorative. Her attitude to her career has always been hands-on – her CV also includes several plays and radio plays, including a forthcoming drama for Radio 4 in which she plays Mae West. She’s the sort of person who “sits up until 2am sketching out ideas for a new opera” (she is married to the record producer Rob Cowan and the couple have one daughter) and puts her prodigious work ethic down to her immigrant DNA. “In my culture, work is deemed the way up and out. I had grandparents who worked their way out of the slums. Work is everything.” What does she think of the younger generation of theatre actors who object to heavy weekly performance schedules? She is quick to say it’s not something she’s ever witnessed.
She worries, though, about the future of the arts. “I am concerned that the conversations [about identity politics] that dominate the landscape these days are suffocating creativity” she says. “There’s a lot of fear now in the rehearsal room. And not just in theatre – I’ve seen it happening in radio and the BBC. It’s not a good basis on which to generate good art. I need to put this carefully, but people need to leave their triggering and their traumas at the door.”
Yet, at the same time, she is conflicted over authenticity casting. “Obviously, as an actor it’s your job to play people other than yourself, otherwise it becomes a documentary. You have to be able to honour a story rather than your own political agenda. On the other hand, Russell T Davies was adamant that only LGBT actors could play those characters in It’s a Sin. He would say that playing gay is different from living gay. And having worked on that show, I know what he means.
“When it comes to Jews, it’s a difficult one. Cillian Murphy played Oppenheimer [in the recent Christopher Nolan film] absolutely brilliantly. But I’ve sometimes been the only Jewish person on a set where they have got so many things wrong in terms of truth. Rabbis hugging young women, for example. And when it’s mentioned, it’s shut down. I’m much more upset about Bradley Cooper wearing a stuck-on nose [to play Leonard Bernstein in Maestro, which opened to warm reviews at the weekend at the Venice Film Festival] that was much larger than Bernstein ever had. If the film had been directed by a Jewish director, it wouldn’t have been allowed to happen.”
She’s 57 now and remains as busy as ever. She’s become more picky, though, about the roles she accepts. “I’m only interested in work that communicates something,” she says. “It’s been fascinating to see how so many people have responded to Merchant as a play about female rage, for instance.
“Female actresses my age have a responsibility to show other women that it’s not all over for you when you hit 40. That life is not just Driving Miss Daisy.”
The Merchant of Venice 1936 is at the Swan Theatre from Sept 21, then touring. Details: merchantofvenice1936.co.uk