Theatre review: The Merchant of Venice(Sam Wanamaker Playhouse)

Measure for Measure, Hamlet and The Merchant of Venice doesn't sound like the most exciting season imaginable on paper, but the Swanamaker has been firing on all cylinders this winter, and in what could have been the least promising offering of all it turns out they've saved the best till last: Abigail Graham's is probably the best Merchant I've ever seen, and not just because she's cut the entirety of Act 5. In fact, as we've come to expect from the Globe, it's not a production that's precious with the text, cutting and reshuffling to serve its purpose. In this instance, it's to set the action in the high-risk, masculine, bullying culture of modern-day city traders, so we open with Aaron Vodovoz' geeky Launcelot Gobbo asking for a job with Bassanio (Michael Marcus.) He's made to play a drinking game as part of his application, which mainly involves a penalty every time he says the word "Jew" - and as he's talking about wanting to leave his current employer, the Jewish moneylender Shylock, he says it a lot. He ends up very drunk and humiliated, but gets the job.

Theatre review: Silent Planet

Instead of facing imprisonment, many dissidents in Soviet Russia were given false diagnoses of mental illness, and packed off to insane asylums. It's a subject Tom Stoppard dealt with in epic fashion in Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, but Eve Leigh has a much more intimate take on the subject in her new play Silent Planet. A metal grill raised on breeze blocks forms the thrust stage at the Finborough for Tom Mansfield's production, where Gavrill (Graeme McKnight) has to attend regular sessions with his psychiatrist, Yurchak (Matthew Thomas.) Of course, Gavrill is there because of his anti-Soviet writing, and has a number of former associates who are still at large, so these therapy sessions look suspiciously like interrogations, and in between them there's every chance he'll be given some kind of radical treatment that looks just as suspiciously like torture.