Acting out trauma in the Theatre of Embarassment: George Tabori's Shylock Improvisations

In 1978 Jewish-Hungarian director and playwright George Tabori created a performance with the elaborate title I would my daughter were dead at my foot, and the jewels in her ear: Improvisations on Shakespeare's Shylock. Based on Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, the piece, produced by the Munich Kammerspiele, was performed in a former boiler room in a cellar by a cast of twelve actors and a musician. Tabori framed his adaptation as therapeutic memory-work, as a personal and collective attempt to come to terms with the trauma of the Holocaust in post-war (West) Germany. The inclusion of Tabori's Shylock Improvisations in many academic works that consider the play in performance confirms the seminal status it has acquired in the production history of the play. (Bulman