Tracy Ann Oberman, the actress at the centre of a legal case about antisemitic online abuse, is to take on the role of Shylock, Shakespeare’s controversial Jewish moneylender.

Oberman who, with the Countdown presenter Rachel Riley, plans to sue 70 Twitter users for aggressive “trolling” about her campaign to rid the Labour party of antisemitism, will play the lead in a production of The Merchant of Venice she is devising with the experienced Shakespearean director Brigid Larmour.

The pair are to move the courtroom drama from its original setting in Renaissance Venice to the East End of London in the 1930s, when political unrest and racial prejudice were rife.

“It is a very problematic play. And it’s clear Shakespeare’s Shylock, along with Dickens’s Fagin, is difficult as a Jewish fictional stereotype, but when I watched the all-female Julius Caesar in 2012, I saw the way these roles can be open to reinterpretation,” said Oberman this weekend, adding that she intends to draw on what she has learned about the nature of antisemitism.

Oberman, who is best known for television roles in EastEnders and in the hit comedies Friday Night Dinner and Toast of London, was later asked to give a reading of Shylock’s most famous speech about bigotry, containing the line, “If you prick us, do we not bleed?” at a charity event. Further inspiration came from family memories of Oberman’s great grandmother, Annie, who lived through that turbulent time in the city.

“Women like her were tough as nails and so I pictured Shylock as a matriach like that,” she said. “The 30s was a very difficult time to be Jewish, to be working-class and to be a woman.”

Talking through her ideas with Larmour, the shape of what Oberman describes as “a viable living world of a different Rialto” emerged.

“Brigid is such an intelligent director and she was very positive,” said Oberman. The two women are already in discussions with a leading artistic director and are to work on the script with a group of actors at the Watford Palace Theatre in early May.

The fresh version of the play will also pay tribute, Oberman hopes, to other Jewish women, such as Riley, the MPs Luciana Berger, Ruth Smeeth and Margaret Hodge, who have each spoken out on the issue bedevilling the Labour party.

“They have been incredibly brave,” said Oberman. “And the response has been racism and mysogyny that I wouldn’t have believed and that hasn’t been seen since the 1930s. But I have tried with everything that’s happened to put it to positive use. I hope it has pushed my creativity into much more powerful and positive directions, not just in seeing a new way to play Shylock, but in a new podcast I am about to launch called Trolled.”