The Merchant of Venice
2015: Polly Findlay

This is one of the productions of the Royal Shakespeare Company of the latest generation. As such I found it both puzzling and disappointing. It’s played on a highly stylized gold-colored stage with a huge pendulum ball swinging for no particular reason in the background and random geometrical shapes lowered from time to time by wires. (We can understand that the pendulum might well indicate the passage of time. It seems labored and relatively uninteresting all the same, and adds nothing that I can identify to the story-telling.) The costumes are random mixtures of contemporary street clothes and other more costume-like garments that nevertheless bespeak no period or cultural affinity.

There are some genuinely good actors here, whose talents seem largely squandered on a schizophrenic view of the play. I was never quite sure whether any particular deficiency of a character was a function of inadequate acting or of directorial vision. Upon viewing the film a second and third time, I’m inclined to think it’s the latter.

The stage business plays up the homosexual link some have claimed to find in the play by finding Bassanio and Antonio in lengthy kisses at the beginning of the play, and again at the trial. Nerissa is a giggling wreck when Gratiano proposes to her; at other times she seems to snap her lines out with a snarky fervor generally out of tune with the character. In a commentary, the director explains that she sees the whole play in terms of the arc of Shylock’s character (which is not an uncommon approach, but still, I think, not wholly correct), and that she sees it also in terms of a lover who leaves a man for a woman (which is really not established explicitly in the play, and is certainly open to debate). The latter she substantiates by reference to the Sonnets, which she contends shows Shakespeare himself in the midst of the same issue. It seems to be arguing much from little: the jury is still out on Shakespeare’s own biography.

The flow of the story seems to me to be remarkably disjunct throughout. Some of this may be because of the relatively extreme cutting of the script — it comes down to 150 minutes, many of which are consumed in non-essential stage business — but some of the discontinuities come from the acting: sometimes the actors seem less to be playing with or against each other than reciting set pieces; at other times they seem to bite the words from a sour apple and spit them out in a monochromatic and adversarial way, whether the situation really calls for an adversarial posture or not. Shylock is adequate, but has relatively little nuance compared to that of many others (Henry Goodman’s especially comes to mind, though that is admittedly setting the bar very high). The young Portia carries herself now like a mall-hopping teenage girl and now like an embittered wife watching her husband lock lips with his boyfriend. Patsy Ferran was twenty-five when the film was made, but “plays young”, as they say, at least here; she lacks the gravity the role requires — either to believe that she could pull off the legal impersonation, or that she’s really old enough and responsible enough to get married. Antonio is a loathsome, gratuitously belligerent yet self-pitying character with a rather passive-aggressive manner that makes one rather hope that at least this time Shylock will take his pound of flesh if only to put Antonio out of our misery.

There are a variety of visual effects, all of them adding up to not much of anything; in an almost random salute to authenticity, there are little bits of choral music throughout that seem to be derivative of Gabrieli (who was an actual Venetian composer of the period). All in all, it seems an imposition of a kind of television game-show physical aesthetic and a turgid sexuality-driven ethic on a play that has more complexity and deserves better. Taken as a whole, it’s as unfocused and unengaging a version of the play as I have seen.

Buy The Merchant of Venice from Amazon.