The Merchant of Venice
With its complex relationship with an at least surface anti-semitism, The Merchant of Venice is a very tricky play to stage for a modern audience, and especially in a school. Add to this the reliance of the plot on certain specific features of Early Modern trade and city life, along with the fairy-tale element of Belmont, and you have a genuine task on your hands.
That the recent school production was such a success is therefore a real achievement. This is especially the case because of the bold decision to update the setting to an early twentieth-century context: bold because the most prominently anti-semitic lines in the play are inevitably less troubling the more historically distant they seem to be. However, as a potent reminder of the dangerous anti-semitism that infected Western Europe right up to the hideous culmination of the Nazis, this ploy worked well. This led to some divergences from usual productions: for example Antonio became, in the hands of Luke Millington-Drake (V) a rather louche and decadent figure, contrasting with Jack Hillcox’s (P) Bassanio who generally seemed a model of good sense. Two figures who inevitably must be played well if the play is to succeed fortunately were: Megan Reynolds (V) as Portia was crisp, sharp, tender and (as a lawyer) forthright – and by the closing scene had shown some genuine comic talent; and Robin Cowie (G) excelled as Shylock, a loping, dangerous, wounded creature with just the right mixture of mendaciously greedy plotting and pent-up thirst for revenge.
The principals obviously need to be good; fortunately this was also the case with the supporting cast. Stand-out mentions must go to Archie Rhind-Tutt (g) in the very difficult ‘clown’ role of Lancelot Gobbo – lines of dense and oblique Shakespearean comic prose that will lie dead on the page and only come to life at the hands of a skilled actor – which here was, fortunately the case. Also getting plenty of laughs were Oliver Goode (R) as Gobbo’s blind father and Michael Thonger (V) as a histrionic Prince of Arragon.
All in all it was a strong production and the entire cast and backstage crew are to be congratulated along with Mitch Broomhead and Mr Freeman. For this writer it was a shame that the world of Belmont was not created more distinctly as the realm of magical transformations that is its structural purpose in the play (as fairy-tale as the Athenian forest in last year’s Midsummer Night’s Dream), and Shylock’s defeat was perhaps a little rushed over, losing some of its most profoundly troubling qualities - but then, unlike Bassanio and Portia, you can’t have everything...
