 | Merchant of Venice |  |
"If you prick us, do we not bleed?
if you tickle us, do we not laugh?
if you poison us, do we not die?
and if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?" Act III, scene i
Written: 1598
Stratford Festival of Canada ; August 3, 2007 Stratford, Canada
Director : Richard Rose ; Starring :
Reviewed on : 2007-08-04 11:20:31 ; Reviewed by : Antonia Mandry
| Sitting across the breakfast table the morning after the performance, the speculation and criticism flew from the mouths like darts. Everyone had a strong opinion and no one was content. It struck me that all of these words distracted me from my first and primary feeling about Richard Rose’s production of The Merchant of Venice: one of overwhelming disgust and dislike for most of the characters. All the characters, save two, use each other, and behave toward each other without honor.
Rose very precisely creates a world of money where usury and using is prevalent: Shylock’s moneylending, Antonio’s speculation as a businessman, Bassanio’s borrowing and spending. The money flows from the fingers of the Christians in the play with a dissolute speed and greed that astonishes and works as couterpart rather than counterpoint to Shylock’s more miserly love of money. Bassanio uses Antonio to gain money with which he can woo and win the wealthy Portia, whom he desires primarily for her money. He tells Antonio what the latter already knows, that he himself is impoverished and has a “plot” to which end he will clear those debts. That plan is Portia. When he gets Antonio’s money, he starts handing it out profligately here and there and everywhere, with echoes of Timon. Sean Arbuckle’s Bassanio is a nice if colourless person, whose good-nature blinds those who love him (Antonio and Portia) from the fact that he uses them both. This Bassanio thinks of money and love as intertwined and one wonders if he would profess his love for Portia so heatedly if she were a pauper. Regardless, he comes passionately to the defense of Antonio when the latter is both impoverished and imperiled.
Scott Wentworth’s Antonio is a morose and curiously still and controlled merchant. At times, Wentworth stands still for just enough time to make the eye go to him in expectation. This Antonio takes his first line, “I am so sad”, as the thematic touchstone for the whole character.
As for the other characters, they remain firmly within the realm of traditional interpretation save for two: Shylock and Jessica. Sara Topham’s ethereal and tragic Jessica remains the resonating character long after the curtain falls. There is a stunned moment from the audience after she first flees her house when Jessica comes on stage, dressed radically different from when she was in her father’s house, painted and dressed like a doll, and playing a “Christian” part. Her relationship with Lorenzo mirrors that of Portia and Bassanio’s in that both come about due to the desire for money and the having of it. The difference is that where Portia ignores Bassanio’s questionable motives and concentrates on her love, Jessica’s position prevents her from doing the same. She is fully aware of the impossible situation she is in: neither a Christian nor a Jew, damned for both, and unable to get past her betrayal and enjoy the superficiality and good fortune that befalls the couple.
Jessica has not only fled her father’s house but she has also stolen from him, a double insult that Shylock feels deeply, and that Salanio falsely misinterprets as the correlation of Shylock’s love of money with his love for his daughter. Graham Greene underplays this point in Shylock’s character and concentrates instead on the character’s anger and need for revenge. Shylock indeed becomes a narrow character in this interpretation, so focused on his limited and legal recourse to revenge that he does not see Portia’s trap looming before him until too late.
The racism of the play’s characters is stomach churning and disturbing, never more so than in the happy “resolution” of the trial scene where Gratiano hurls Shylock’s words back at him and spits on him. It is the schadenfreude of the last scene which horrifies the most. The sheer joy the characters, save Antonio, have in Shylock’s misfortune. Antonio alone, although he takes his vengeance in a particular horrible way that may seem merciful to him – the forced conversion of Shylock, seems stunned by it, too, holding Shylock’s yarmulke at the end. It is Shylock who has forsaken his love of money for revenge, or what he sees as a kind of violent justice, and Antonio, his twin, who forgoes his monetary revenge instead for a religious one.
The usury of this play is not limited to Shylock’s profession, but to elements of all the characters, the difference being that Shylock is a moneylender since, as a Jew, no other profession is allowed him, while the others are users due to how their society works. The result of this production is that the audience leaves the performance disgusted with most of the characters, and sympathetically listening to the haunting song of Jessica as the lights fade. An unsettling end to an unsettling production.
|
|
Sir John Gilbert, R.A.,
The Moneylenders
Reviews
|  | Royal Shakespeare Company
April 10, 2008 |  | Stratford Festival of Canada
August 3, 2007 |  | OVO at Trestle Arts Base
April 20, 2007 |  | California Shakespeare Theater
August 17, 2006 |  | MGM
2005 |  | Royal Shakespeare Company
1998 |  | William Poel
1898 |  | Junius Brutus Booth (1796-1852)
c. 1800 |  | John Philip Kemble (1757-1823)
1784 |  | Charles Macklin
c. 1740 |  | George Granville
1701 |
|
>> next reviews
|
|
