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: A Doll's House

The seasoned veteran in 2019's round of Artistic Director Musical Chairs, Rachel O’Riordan taking over the Lyric Hammersmith means she's run theatres in Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales and now England. On the other hand she could be seen as the one with the most to prove to a London audience, considering her last outing here was last year's catastrophically misjudged revival of Foxfinder. Well her opening production feels like it's done a good job of catching the Lyric's brand, taking as it does a well-loved classic - Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House, a play that seems to be on a lot of people's radar at the moment - and giving it a fresh twist. It's also, despite the fact that the story's been kept in the year of the play's premiere, 1879, a reinvention that ties in to a lot of current concerns, namely the way the rose-tinted view of Britain's colonial past has finally come back to cause destruction in Britain itself, and that past is ripe for reevaluation.