The set and costumes do little to help this young cast achieve any sense of place. The play opens and closes with a chummy folk dance that, for one awful moment during the finale, I thought was going to morph into Hava Nagila, as Shylock square dances with his tormentors. The homoerotic opening is reduced to a gauche display of male bonding and bravado, thus leaving James Garnon’s Antonio with little logical reason to explain his willingness to take on Shylock’s bond. This also leaves no room for the power of his unrequited love for Bassanio to be examined, and contrasted to Bassanio’s mercenary love for Portia. Another pair of dramatic equations fall from orbit and unbalance this already off-kilter production.
The cast are dressed for the most part in ill fitting suits that do little to help these uncomfortable players raise the ensemble scenes above the level of the school play, bereft as they are of any significant scenery for most of the play’s duration. They troop aimlessly about on the stage, which, washed in scarlet paint, resembles the floor of some disused, unhygienic abattoir.
When there is scenery, it has a random and perplexing nature. During the ‘choose the casket’ scene, the Prince of Morocco (apparently dressed by the wardrobe department of Carry On... Up The Khyber) has to choose from three glass fish tanks, on plinths, while Georgina Rich’s Portia looks on from inside a cave framed by stalactites, and on a shelf over her head disembodied hands play half full wine glasses. This looks like nothing if not an episode of Deal or No Deal, live from the planet Zerg, created by the production crew of a mid-eighties episode of Dr Who. The commodification of Portia from beyond the grave by her father, and how it reflects and refracts Shylock’s relationship with his daughter, is polluted by this parodic pantomime.
Act Four is this production’s last chance to save itself. Portia, who has, up to the courtroom scene, been the most commendable female in the company, has her limitations exposed by the ‘deeds of mercy’ speech, for they are not 'strain’d'; rather they are made to suffer multiple fractures, in the most desperately bland delivery of one of the great speeches of supplication in all of Shakespeare. Add to that the fact the choreography of the court scene does little other than raise the suspicion that this young cast all need immediate treatment for ADHD. Indeed, it is the audience that, instead of being twice blessed, ends up being twice vexed by this confused and wasted scene.
The cast certainly wear their anxiety on their sleeves, for once Shylock is dispensed with (well, until square dancing duties call), a huge sigh of relief is palpable, and they raise their collective game to finish Act Five in an energetic display of romantic comedy. They seem relieved to be in some distant relation of Twelfth Night, as opposed to dealing with all that nasty anti-Semitic controversy, and playing mercy against judgment. However, before the denouement, there is one more agony to suffer, and agony is the only way to describe the delivery that Patrick Moy as Lorenzo gives his opening lines at the start of Act Five. 'Drone' could describe it, but somehow that implies some latent cadence, something that picks the delivery off the oratorical flat line it so implacably inhabited; the famous monotone of Peter Cook’s E. L. Wisty is positively Churchillian in comparison. My only thought was total disbelief that I was hearing something so awful on such a hallowed stage, apart, that is, from realising Mr Moy must consider Shakespearian meter some carnivorous Tudor delicacy, and not something worthy of his attention while he is performing on the stage in Stratford-upon-Avon.
Article comments
1 - Polemicscat
Good essay. As you suggest, Shylock's being required to convert to Christianity is at odds with modern sensibilities. In order to accept that as a satisfactory solution, we have to remember that the sixteenth-century audience would have believed that Shylock was eternally blessed by conversion.