Theatre Review

The Merchant of Venice
Royal Shakespeare Theatre, dir. Rupert Goold

(Seen on 26th May, 2011)

Every time I go to the theatre I wonder why I don't go more often. There's something about the live experience of theatre that film can't even begin to approximate. Granted, I live in York, where perhaps we don't have the best provision for theatre (although we do currently have the best Pantomime in the country at Christmas), but even if that is true Leeds isn't very far away. I've no excuse, basically.

So I've never heard of Rupert Goold, although he's apparently making something of a name for himself as an exciting new director. I took the option to see it when I was at the Shakespeare Institute's Annual Graduate Conference last week mostly because Patrick Stewart was playing Shylock. I've heard of him at least! In the event, good as he was, the real stand out performance for me was Susannah Fielding who played Portia. Most of the cast were good in fact, although the accents sometimes wavered. Richard Riddell, who played Bassanio, was particularly guilty of this, with an accent that veered between one side of the Atlantic and the other and back again. What's most hard to avoid talking about of course, is the setting they chose to place the play in: Las Vegas.

Mr Goold is a conceptualist apparently, or so I heard him described by someone else at the conference. Certainly there was a very clear concept at work. The three caskets scene was imaginatively reworked as a trashy game show, vaguely reminiscent of Deal or No Deal. Within the reality of the play however it seemed at times to have a reality with backstage staff appearing at one point whilst at others seeming to exist as little more than as a metaphor, slipping between both an imaginative and a real space. Which gets to the heart of the concept. This wasn't set in America, it was set in Americana, our dream of the place and it's culture: Las Vegas, Elvis, Goodfellas, Patrick Stewart's performance channeling Dustin Hoffman and Paccino, Wild at Heart, Film Noir, Guantanamo, Spanish immigrant (slave) labour, a probably a dozen others I'm either forgetting or missed.

One of the problems with imposing such a clear concept on the play is that it can end up as something of a game: how will they make such and such an aspect work in their chosen setting. It can still be an extraordinarily powerful way to reinterpret a play. I can still remember images from Macbeth on the Estate, which was shown on TV when I was teenager, a very powerful reinterpretation. But I wonder of it doesn't also risk flattening the play when you impose such a powerful and loaded overaching concept.

They also broadened the plays racism. Portia and her maid Nerissa act towards Jessica with patronising anti-semitism.When Morocco first appears, bananas are thrown onto the stage, something I think I would have found more shocking if I hadn't known it was going to happen. Seeing it as part of a conference, we also got to meet the actor who played the Duke of Morocco and the shows Assistant Director who gave a brief talk and q+a as a plenary. They were very cagey about giving too much away about the setting, which might have accounted for the slight air of smugness that came across when someone asked the obvious question of how has it been received by the audience. Of course they've had letters accusing them of 'destroying' the play. Obviously this is nonsense. You can't appreciate every production of a play, and it's especially nonsense in the case of a dramatist and a play which has been performed so many times before and will be performed again.

Still, I find myself wondering just how daring this production is actually being. The Merchant of Venice is a play whose meaning has been utterly changed by history. We can't see it the same way it's original audience must have done, or even any audience watching it before the Second World War, when anti-semitism was either a perfectly normal social attitude to have or at least tolerated. Shakespeare's play isn't about racism. It's actually racist because that's how we now interpret the depiction of Shylock. So I wonder if making it so much about 'racism' doesn't actually flatten out the plays meaning?

There was something almost deliberately awkward, even admirable in this production's utter refusal to give its audience any satisfaction. Whilst there were a great many sight gags, we were always laughing at them and not with the characters because everyone was largely hateful, even cartoonish.. Both the scene following Bassanio's successful guessing of the correct casket and the final one where Portia and Nerrisa tease their repective husbands about giving away their rings are played in a way which denies any joy in these events, suffuced with a melancholy which emphasises the distance between the characters. Which doesn't quite work in the case of the latter scene where it felt a little forced.

Of course, ultimately it has to work for today's audience. Fixing it so clearly to America through its imagery feeds into a lot of people instintive anti Americanism (when the bananas actually come from the behavior of British football fans). I can't deny the effectiveness of the various theatrical devices and props deployed. It works, and Susannah Fielding was, as I've already said, excellent. Ultimately, the fact that it's impossible to have any sympathy for anyone in the play is surely a valid interpretation.

One final thing: Shylock hides his Jewishness from the characters who surround him, removing his yarmulke before he goes out. It's only once he loses Jessica and seeks to carry out his barbaric debt that adopts a more obviously 'Jewish' manner of dress in the trial scene. The one moment of sympathy he gets comes not with the obvious 'If you prick us, do we not bleed?' speech which feels thrown away here, but immediately afterwards when he is left alone on stage and dances a few steps to some mournful Klezmer music. In locating sympathy for Shylock not in the common humanity expressed in his famous speech but instead in the wordless acknowledgement of his Jewishness does this production not further alienate him from the surrounding Christian characters?