Robert Gordon has worked as an actor, director and playwright in the UK, South Africa, Ireland, Italy, USA and Czech Republic, and is author of Red Earth, a play about women under apartheid, and Waterloo Road. He is author of The Purpose of Playing: Modern Acting Theory in Perspective (2006), Harold Pinter’s Theatre of Power (2012) and British Musical Theatre Since 1950 (2016) with Olaf Jubin and Millie Taylor. He has also edited three collections on musical theatre for OUP. As Professor of Theatre and Director of the Pinter Centre for Performance and Creative Writing at Goldsmiths, University of London, he introduced the first British MA in Musical Theatre. For the Pinter Centre, he devised and co-directed Pinter: In Other Rooms, which toured European cities. Shylock Speaks is part of a 10-year creative research project, Decolonising Shakespeare, which aims to confront present-day racism as the legacy of European anti-Semitism and colonialism.