"Most women have a lot of rage"
Nearly 20 years since she left EastEnders, Tracy-Ann Oberman jumped at the chance to revive the notorious Chrissie Watts
Jonathan Ford
- Libby Purves
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Stand by at the Queen Vic: Chrissie Watts is back. “I can’t give anything away about what happens,” says Tracy-Ann Oberman demurely, “but she has fabulous hair. Less curly than it used to be.” It’s 19 years since the celebrated EastEnders scene when Chrissie killed her husband “Dirty” Den and Oberman hints that the character had a long time in prison to think about things and become “even more of a survivor”.
“When Chris [Clenshaw, EastEnders’ executive producer] rang and asked me to come back and described an explosive storyline, I said: ‘Oh yes, I’m coming back for that!’”
Following her debut in 2004, Oberman’s 218 episodes of the soap fixed Chrissie firmly in the national consciousness: hacking off her rival’s hair, hurling a chair through a window, finishing off Den with Pauline Fowler’s iron doorstop, then being pushed into his open grave by Barbara Windsor as Peggy. “That was fun. Something very old-Hollywood about it all. I got a big gay following.” She also had another accolade: “I made it into Vogue, [for getting] a Diane von Furstenberg wrap dress into Albert Square.”
Not that great hair and outfits are the point: “I loved Chrissie because she’s complicated, victim or villain. Soaps are brilliant for these big women’s roles. They were revolutionary back in the day – Coronation Street and EastEnders, working-class characters in recognisable worlds with strong matriarchs. Chrissie, Bet Lynch, Hilda Ogden, Dot Cotton – nothing was based on their looks or high glam, just real, proper, breathing, strong women keeping family and community together.”
Tracy-Ann Oberman as Chrissie and “Dirty” Den Watts in EastEnders in 2004.
She loved going back to the Albert Square set (“Some of the crew are the same!”) but had slight qualms about being Chrissie again after so long. “But within two minutes there she was, like finding a coat you’d put in the attic that still fits.”
Oberman has always revelled in playing tough women in both light and darker parts, notably in the radio plays she has written about famous figures: she has played Elizabeth Taylor, Joan Crawford and Katharine Hepburn, and was Anne Bancroft in her play about how casting Bancroft as the older seducer of Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate revolutionised Hollywood conventions.
She planned another about Bill and Hillary Clinton in the weekend after the Monica Lewinsky scandal: “Fiery, intense, a political deal-making conversation. Actually, Hillary was my way into Chrissie Watts: that idea of a powerful, intelligent woman who stayed with a man who had a fatal flaw and couldn’t keep it in his pants. She forgave him endlessly, so her fatal flaw was how much she loved him.”
Now 58, she studied classics once and loves those echoes, too. “I’ve been twice on Celebrity Mastermind, on the women of Imperial Rome. Women in a patriarchal society who knew to look subservient but also how to control their men: persuade, seduce or poison. They were the templates for female power with seething anger underneath, having to be potent in a society that makes them impotent. Most women probably have a huge amount of rage, don’t they? We’re all brought up not to show it. And you don’t see it on stage or screen very often.”
Tracy-Ann Oberman as Chrissie Watts. BBC
Where you certainly do is in The Merchant of Venice 1936, her radical version of Shakespeare’s play, re-set in London at the time of Oswald Mosley’s fascist campaign and the marches against Jews in the East End, culminating in the Battle of Cable Street. Performed to plaudits at the RSC, then on a tour including Wilton’s Music Hall (adjacent to Cable Street, the hall is said to have acted as a base for anti-fascist campaigners), the play now returns to the West End and a national tour.
The Venetian nobles who insult Shylock become fascist acolytes of Mosley, and Oberman herself plays the Jewish money lender as an “immigrant matriarch, like the ones I grew up with, my great-grandmother from Belarus; my aunties, one who smoked a cigar, another in the schmutter [clothing] trade. My grandma was on the front line at Cable Street; Grandpa Alf was thrown through a plate glass window. But when the fascists marched in to tell the Jews they weren’t welcome here, the local working-class who fought for them – cockneys, dockers, Somali sailors – all said: ‘If you’re coming for the Jews, you’re coming for us all!’”
Six years ago, when the project began, she had no idea that it would prove horribly topical today, with a surge in not only antisemitism but an “othering” hatred towards Muslims and immigrants.
“I had never liked The Merchant of Venice, Hitler’s favourite play for good reason. It was taught very badly at school, nobody pointing out the racism, the hypocrisy, church and state working for the elite. As a Jewish girl I was made to read Shylock, and then at breaktime… Well, since then I’ve seen it done both with pity for Shylock and hate.
I like complicated women; villains aren’t born, they’re made
“But rather than join people who say it should never be done, I wanted to reframe it. Show an immigrant matriarch who wants her daughter’s life to be better than hers. A strong woman who’s perhaps dislikeable, but villains are never born, they’re made. And that links nicely into Chrissie – if you villainise someone, they’ll be a villain!”
Indeed, one of the most arresting moments in the production is Oberman as Shylock in court insisting on the “pound of flesh” in the contract the arrogant Antonio signed, demanding her due even if it kills him.
As a result of the current demonstrations targeting British Jews, Oberman has had 24-hour security during the run of the play. “It’s become normalised, but it’s wrong. The play is not about the legitimacy of a state of Israel founded centuries later. Of course, it’s important to be able to be critical of the Israeli government and put terrible wars under scrutiny. But when you start using Nazi vocabulary – ‘Zios’ is what Nazis called Jews long before the State of Israel existed – it’s dangerous.”
She sadly says she is “an accidental activist, as well as an actress and a writer who has long spoken up against misogyny, bullying and racism”, who never wanted to be in politics, but publicly left the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn after a woman who spray-painted pro-Gaza messages on the walls of the Warsaw ghetto was invited to speak at its conference. “That’s my family’s grave, where my great-aunt and her whole family died.”
BBC/Jack Barnes
She adds, “As the late, great Rabbi Sacks said, antisemitism is not just about Jews, it’s about a sickness in the larger society. Any society that allows its Jewish community to feel under threat, history shows all other evils will follow. That’s why The Merchant of Venice 1936 ends with such a positive message, of all different communities pulling together at the Battle of Cable Street against others who seek division, because we are stronger together, better together, prouder together.”
EastEnders filming fitted neatly between runs of the play, and I wonder about future parts. She would love to be Lady Macbeth, and likes moving between comedy and dramatic tragedy. “All good writers know that within every comedy is tragedy, and every tragedy has comedy.” Her teenage daughter Anoushka is following her into acting, so what advice does she offer to young women in this often spiteful world?
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“Get a training, keep your head screwed on, and don’t buy into the fame and fortune. Do it because you need to tell stories, embody characters and feel the alchemy of the first day of rehearsal. There’s no room for narcissism.”
Authors
Libby Purves
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