Radio review: The Merchant of Venice

Despite the theatres gradually reopening this will still end up being a very Shakespeare-light year for me, so it's as good a time as any to catch up on a few more of the recent audio adaptations from Radio 3, which remain available on BBC Sounds under the Shakespeare Sessions strand. It's not a particular favourite of mine but it's been a few years since my last Merchant of Venice and the casting for Emma Harding's 2018 production is intriguing, notably that of Andrew Scott as Shylock. Harding has set the story in the City of London during the 2008 financial crash, and to open with a sidebar, I was once interviewed for a theatre job by someone who supposedly specialised in "authentic" Shakespeare, who grumbled a lot about a modern-dress RSC production of this play, saying it was impossible to set it post-Holocaust. Unless you base your interpretation entirely on the fact that the play's antisemitism is openly state-sanctioned (and I've talked elsewhere about my feelings on defining an entire production by one line or scene,) that seems either a naïvely sunny view of modern tolerance, or more likely a restrictively literal-minded approach to theatre: In the years leading up to that particular crash Jews might not have been the bogeyman of choice, but the post-9/11 world wasn't exactly shy about demonising one group of people.

If the way the play deals with prejudice needs contextualising for every new production and the world it plays in, its financial themes couldn't be more easily translated to 2008: Venice's financial system, or at the very least that of merchant Antonio (Ray Fearon,) is built on very little that's concrete. It's all loans secured against loans, and when his friend Bassanio's (Colin Morgan) credit runs out, Antonio fronts him the cash for a mission to woo wealthy heiress Portia (Hayley Atwell.) Antonio doesn't actually have the cash himself, but he's confident all the deals he has up in the air will come good, so he borrows it from Shylock, even accepting an eccentric clause in the deal that to all intents and purposes means Shylock can kill him if he fails to repay on time. Not only do the merchant's deals all come crashing down, but the moneylender's daughter Jessica (Lauren Cornelius) elopes with another trader, Lorenzo (Chris Lew Kum Hoi,) taking much of his wealth with them and tipping him over the edge emotionally. As Antonio was always openly, viciously antisemitic towards him until he needed his help, Shylock is now willing to take the gory advantage he's got over him seriously, for revenge against both him in particular and the system as a whole.

So much of Scott's acting seems to be in the way he waves his fingers around that casting him in audio made me wonder how he'd come across, and in the end there's something rather cold and sociopathic about his performance. At first his Shylock is an outsider as much because of how he deals financially as because of his religion, a rather stuffy, remote man whose wealth is based on something solid, not gambling with other people's money like almost everyone else in the story. When he makes a deal he knows he can back it up, and that's why everyone comes to him when their own system implodes. In terms of what's in the text itself, I always find Shylock's reaction to Jessica's elopement (saying he's angrier about losing the money and jewels she took than her) as more problematic than the bloodthirsty dénouement; the latter is a man mentally broken and set on revenge, but the former demonises him as much more of a lazy Jewish stereotype. The setting helps put this scene into context a bit more too though, as the moment that breaks him: Jessica at least has some agency of her own in choosing who to marry, even if he doesn't necessarily see it that way. But taking his property (including some jewellery with sentimental value) is adding insult to injury, the traders' sense of entitlement that, once their gambles blow up their faces, there's always his stockpile to help themselves to. Shylock is the bailout, and the bankers aren't remotely grateful.

There's a move in recent years around no longer selling this as a comedy - never mind the politics, it's just not funny. Harding's production definitely aims more for a drama, with the only funny moments from the original text coming from Portia's failed suitors. The edit cuts out Portia's overt racism about the Prince of Morocco (Stefan Adegbola,) and I'm never sure what that achieves since she's going to turn pretty cruel to Shylock in the trial scene: You may as well see her true colours earlier on than hold her up as the plucky heroine she's often represented as, then have her demand that Shylock be left destitute come out of nowhere. But Atwell's Portia is definitely an apt representative of Old Money in this 21st century context, glibly dismissing the debt that's been a matter of life and death for the whole play. And is there anything more entitled than assuming you can put on a disguise on a whim, and do as good a job in court as a distinguished barrister? (The fact that she does is neither here nor there.)

I've listened to "modern dress" radio productions before and it tends to involve a couple of car noises and ringing phones in the background; Harding makes more of an effort, adding in a few lines of modern text like Nerissa (Kerry Gooderson) giving Portia a massage, Portia's suitors applying for the challenge via a video dating app, and a soundtrack largely comprised of the particular sub-genre of R'n'B that's all about bragging about cash and bling (one character has "Gold Digger" as their mobile ringtone.) Since it's been edited down to two hours I was hoping more of the terrible final act would have been jettisoned than actually was, but until then I found this one of the more interesting versions of a play that can be something of a slog.

The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare is available on BBC Sounds.

Running time: 2 hours.

Image credit: BBC.