Acting out trauma in the theatre of embarassment: George Tabori's Shylock improvisations

This article considers George Tabori’s play, Shylock Improvisations, as an expression of an emerging cultural sensibility that regarded the Nazi holocaust as the traumatic event of the twentieth century, with the post-war era becoming a post-traumatic age, in which the individual and the collective were considered psychologically affected or wounded and in need of healing.