Opening with Gobbo also makes sense because he's the go-between in an affair that usually plays as a subplot, but which Graham puts front and centre: Shylock's daughter Jessica (Eleanor Wyld) is planning to elope with Lorenzo (Daniel Bowerbank,) taking with her some of her father's wealth and converting to Christianity for him.
But it's Bassanio who kicks off the play's most famous plotline, as he needs money to travel to Belmont, where a wealthy heiress seeks a husband via a bizarre game show. He takes out a loan from Shylock, secured by his friend Antonio (Michael Gould,) who also happens to be rabidly antisemitic, even by the standards of his society - so much so he can't help but continue to goad the moneylender, even as he needs his help. In frustration, Shylock (Adrian Schiller) retaliates with a symbolic power play: As collateral if he fails to pay the debt back within three months, Antonio has to allow Shylock to cut off a pound of his flesh. It is just a symbolic gesture until it isn't: Just as Antonio's investments fail and he defaults on the loan, his daughter's betrayal tips Shylock over the edge.
I'd argue that, in productions I've seen at least, The Merchant of Venice is no longer a "problem play" in the sense of not fitting comfortably into the comedy category it was originally meant for, so successfully has it been reframed as a darkly comic tragedy about bigotry and privilege. Never as successfully as it is here though, and a huge part of that comes from the casting of Schiller as Shylock. I was pleased to see one of the best character actors out there (remember his anti drink-driving ad?) get such an iconic Shakespearean role, and he's extraordinary in it.
This is a timid, precise man, worn down by the abuse of his people in general and himself in particular. He's got a steely determination but only because he has to - when he demands that the terms of his contract be taken literally it isn't because he takes any pleasure in it, but because he has no choice: His name, his family and his religion have been trodden into the ground, and it's his duty to restore their dignity with the only weapon he's got, namely the law and the peculiar circumstances that have given him an advantage. In a play obsessed with flesh and blood, not just in plot but in language and metaphor, there's nothing bloodthirsty about this Shylock. At the trial scene, many productions have him take butcher knives out of his briefcase for comic effect; here it's instead kitchen scales and a Tupperware pot - he's a details man with a job to do. When it finally looks like he might actually get to do it, he's shaking more than Antonio.
But the standout moment is a speech, and not the most famous "Hath not a Jew eyes?" one. Instead it's the much more problematic "my daughter/my ducats" scene, in which Shylock lives up to antisemitic cliché by bemoaning the loss of the riches Jessica took when she left, more than the loss of Jessica herself. Schiller makes it crystal clear that every word means the opposite of what it says: The pain of his daughter's betrayal is too much to actually confront; better to dismiss it, and focus on the money. It's only when insult is added to injury at the news that his late wife's ring has been exchanged for a pet monkey, that his focus moves on to revenge. The way Schiller flips the speech from the one that makes Shylock most alien, to the one that most humanises him, is a performance that should be studied in every drama school. Oh, I've seen people try to repurpose this scene; I've never seen them succeed to such heart-stopping effect.
When I first started encountering Shakespeare, Portia was held up as one of the great female characters, presumably because of the way she, disguised as a man, outwits all the men in the trial scene and finds the loophole to send Shylock from his newfound position of power to the gutter. In recent years I've seen more of a re-evaluation of the fact that, if Shylock isn't a pure villain, his nemesis can't be a pure hero. Similarly to Rupert Goold's Merchant of Vegas production, Graham's version sees her fairytale betrothal game as a kind of reality TV game show, with Nerissa (Tripti Tripuraneni) as the hostess (I liked the gag of her holding her candle a bit like a microphone.) Also in keeping with Goold's production, this one acknowledges Portia's racism, but takes it further to make it her defining feature. Sophie Melville's Portia is a shallow, vacuous, casually cruel reality star, who makes her racist comments in full hearing of her South Asian maid, cheerfully ignoring the way she's visibly hurt by them. She doesn't just show open disgust to the idea of the Prince of Morocco (Bowerbank) as a suitor; when the same actor plays Lorenzo, she has to deal with him in a professional capacity so he can look after her estate in her absence, but she won't go so far as to shake his hand.
Pushing Portia to such an extreme of shallowness does make it harder to buy her as the legal prodigy who flips the tables at the last minute; personally I chose to interpret it as fact that the real lawyer really did give her instructions on how to plead the case. Certainly Melville doesn't play the scene as if she's figuring out the case's complexities as she goes along, more that she's got a script to stick to, and she'll use it to play cat-and-mouse with an unwitting Shylock. Because another thing that's driven home is that when money is power, Portia has by far the most of it: When told the amount of money that's ruining the lives of so many people she supposedly cares about, she's never heard anything so funny as the fact that it's a "mere" 3000 ducats. It's only belatedly that she remembers that gender is the one thing that trumps money in her society. After actively cheating in the game so she can marry Bassanio on the sole basis that he looks like Michael Marcus so fair enough, she wants a piece of that, she realises that he now controls all her assets. And the audience have actually seen what his personality is like, so good luck with that.
I don't think I've seen a Merchant of Venice I didn't think would be improved by jettisoning Act 5 entirely: Even taken out of context it's a pretty feeble comedy of misunderstandings, never mind the tonal shift of adding it to the end of a story that now plays very differently than when it was written. So it's a joy to see it actually happen, all the chatter of life's winners relegated to the background of the story where it belongs, while Jessica reclaims the Jewish identity she rejected earlier in the play. There's even an ambiguous conclusion that could be a happy ending, Shylock mirroring his daughter's escape and possibly getting away from Venice and his punishment.
It's not the only streamlining of the play. I know I often mention liking shorter shows, and yes it's partly because I like getting my theatre hit and getting home at a sensible hour, but major text edits can be such a bonus in other ways. In Shakespeare it can be because everyone makes different choices of what to cut and what to keep, which means lines can come to the forefront in different ways. Here the thing that stood out that had never really hit home before is Shylock berating Antonio for offering interest-free loans to Christians. This isn't an arch-capitalist sneering at someone's generosity as it often comes across, but another specific and targeted act of antisemitism by Antonio: Moneylending is the only profession available to Jews in mediaeval Venice, and by providing the service for free Antonio is actively trying to put them out of business. It's just another outstanding detail in a production that shows the way to create a 21st century reading of a play whose values remain firmly in the 16th.
The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare is booking in repertory until the 9th of April at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse.
Running time: 2 hours 10 minutes including interval.
Photo credit: Tristram Kenton.
Great review, Sounds like a production I would very much like.
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