Globe Theatre | ★★★✩✩
Director Abigail Graham boldly responds to Shakespeare’s problem play with imagination and political conviction. In this updated version of Merchant, the view that the world is both run and ruined by a white racist establishment is conveyed at every opportunity: in the way Sophie Melville’s fair (in both senses) Portia bears her disdain for her suiters of colour, and as Ben Caplan’s Jew-bating Solanio adopts the lilt that for years has been the go-to accent in this country whether portraying Jews in a joke or a serious drama.
It is there too in the way Antonio and his beloved Bassanio (Michael Gould and Michael Marcus) gad about in pastel-coloured clothes as though they were on safari in one of their colonies or on their way to the Henley regatta.
By contrast, Adrian Schiller’s quietly commanding Shylock, with his black briefcase in one hand and a reusable coffee mug in the other, could have stepped straight out of Hatton Garden.
Schiller’s Shylock has the recognisably Jewish air of a man who wants gentiles to leave him the hell alone. More than any Shylock I have seen, the objective here is to elicit sympathy from the audience. For the “Hath not a Jew eyes” speech, Venetians retreat from this theatre’s warm candlelight, allowing Shylock to make his appeal as a direct address to the audience. And in the court scene, instead of the singleminded, murderous intent exhibited by just about every Shylock before this one, Schiller’s reluctance to cut out a pound of Christian flesh is so obvious that Gould’s Antonio (now coughing and in a wheelchair for unclear reasons) approaches Shylock’s knife, daring him to use it.
By now, Eleanor Wyld’s hitherto brown-haired Jessica is the blonde gentile she has long yearned to be. The Jewish daughter’s perspective is another big idea here with the evening opening not with Antonio lamenting his sadness but with Shylock’s daughter already looking forward to eloping with Christian Bessanio. “Tonight’s gonna be a good night” she sings — a song not a million miles from that other number anticipating love’s arrival, Something’s Coming from West Side Story.
The play ends with her regretting it all and intoning in Hebrew her grief for her father’s humiliation and forced conversion. Does all this amount to a Merchant in which the play’s antisemitism is revealed to be the rot at the core of this society? More than most.
But to achieve this, so much of the play has to be changed — including a new line for Shylock that states how money lending is “his only means as decreed” — that the production ends up arguing for the play to be avoided rather than performed.
Even this production’s even-tempered appeal to recognise a Jew’s humanity has an unintended consequence. Removing the speech’s anger makes the intention to kill all the more cold-blooded.
The Merchant I have long awaited — more out of curiosity than any impulse to see the play again — is one whose Shylock is visually no different from the Christians around him. Recently, a clue to how this could work can be seen in Jamie Lloyd’s terrific production of Cyrano, which denudes James McAvoy’s French hero of the biggest conk in the canon — bigger even than the ones used for past Shylocks.
In Cyrano, the effect simultaneously reveals the prejudice of those onstage to be the irrational bigotry that it is while at the same time “de-othering” Cyrano for the audience. If it can work for Cyrano, it can for Shylock. But for all the well-meaning recalibration of Shakespeare’s play, the theatre establishment here is still so wedded to the notion of the Jew as other, I really wouldn’t hold your breath.
Read more: Shylock's identity crisis
Read more: Is it time to cancel the Merchant of Venice?
