How do you solve a problem like Shylock?

The process of aging has had differing effects on Shakespeare’s plays in modern performance. In the case of The Merchant of Venice, age has added much body, and history a deep maturity, leaving a work of immense potency, a rich complex drama that asks as much of the audience as it does of the cast.

Well, that was what I thought I was going to write as an opening, as I savoured the prospect of another spellbinding three hours in the company of the Royal Shakespeare Company. Now I find myself waiting and reflecting before writing this review: was it really that bad, could it have been so soulless, timid, and cowardly as it had seemed? Yes, to the point it could quite possibly be the worst performance of a Shakespearean play I have ever witnessed at the R.S.C., or anywhere else for that matter.

The story of the play is too well known to be tediously recounted here. With its semantics, romantics, and anti-Semitism, it has been performed continually since 1596. However, the questions that arise in this ‘problem play’ are imbued with much contemporary relevance: the impact bankers' decisions can have on all our lives is suddenly news, for example. The commodification of the human being, inter-faith religious conflict, and the homoerotic overtones that lurk in male-dominated competitive environments are aspects of the play that may have had lesser importance in initial performances, too.

The play is comprised of a complex set of opposing dramatic equations, each one a finely balanced duality, where ethics can counterbalance principle, with just enough paradoxical morality to demand an enquiry from a questioning audience into the various humanitarian complexities thus exposed. Such is the finely wrought balance of the play that unsympathetic direction can, and sadly did, disturb this delicately poised dramatic equilibrium; actors are just men, and plays are just words.

Perhaps the director Tim Carroll should have renamed the play (which carried an alternate title, The Jew of Venice, ‘The Play That Dare Not Speak Its Name’, for it is with some irony that the most unbalanced role, Shylock, is performed by the only actor, Angus Wright, to project any charisma or character into his part. Why ironical? Because this Shylock is as Jewish as the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Wright plays Shylock like an astute C.E.O. of some anonymous international financial organisation. This might have shed light into unexplored areas of the play, if only the crux of the play lay elsewhere, but it is not so. The fulcrum of the most important dramatic equation is the alleged mercy of Antonio and his final triumphant demand that Shylock become a Christian. If Shylock’s rough justice is to cut out Antonio’s heart, deaf to any plea for mercy, then Shylock’s conversion to Christianity, demanded by Antonio, would steal Shylock’s very soul, and deny him eternal salvation: a telling indictment of Christian mercy, and exposure of inter-religious intolerance. Consequentially the scene is not quite so effective or telling, as this Shylock appears to be an almost secular executive, who pays little import to his faith.