The Merchant of Venice
2016: Robin Lough

This is the Globe production of the play. As often here, they have roped in one well-known star from the larger world as a supplement to their normal repertory cast. In this case, that star is Jonathan Pryce, a talent of formidable diversity and nuance, who has played almost every kind of role on film; his IMDB credits run to well over two hundred items. He played Dark in the Disney Something Wicked This Way Comes, Juan Peron in the filmed Evita, and the unsavory title character in the BBC Timon of Athens, as well as a vast number of other roles of every description. Within the constraints of the medium — a filmed live performance in front of a somewhat rowdy crowd — he carries himself with at least the usual aplomb. It is not the best Shylock out there, as far as I’m concerned (which title I would have to give to Henry Goodman in the Trevor Nunn version), but I’m not sure the medium would allow it. Interestingly, he plays against his own real-life daughter Phoebe in the role of his narrative daughter Jessica. She has clearly inherited the familial acting chops, and does quite well with the role.

Rachel Pickup’s almost fragile and waif-like Portia is a bit more difficult to square with her attempt to appear mannish at the trial, but it still works; at Belmont she carries herself with a suitably aristocratic air that is completely plausible. The remainder of the cast handle their roles well, and if there are no real standouts, neither are there any sour notes that really don't work. The two failed suitors are played (as usual) for laughs, and are more than usually two-dimensional, but this is certainly not out of line with the shape of the play. The runaway mugging and clowning that characterizes many of Dominic Dromgoole’s Globe productions is not generally evident, and the humor of the play has its place, while still allowing the seriousness of many of its themes to come out.

Shylock’s Jewish status and culture is manifested in a number of interesting ways, some of which may be hard to account for. There are points where Shylock speaks to Jessica in Yiddish: it’s clearly a Germanic translation of Shakespeare’s English. One wonders whether a Jewish Venetian family in the 1500s would have this as part of their background. The Jewish community (and the first Ghetto) in Venice was an unusual mix of Italian-rite Jews, Sephardim, and Ashkenazy Jews; it seems less likely that they would have arrived by way of Germany, even in the previous several generations. This may be merely a cultural shorthand as a demarcation of the status of Venetian Jews as outsiders, however. More troubling to me, purely on an aesthetic line: near the end of the play, Jessica breaks out into an impassioned sung lament in Hebrew, apparently mourning her Jewish heritage, now (apparently) irretrievably lost. It’s a powerful and potentially heartbreaking interjection that has no correspondence with anything in Shakespeare’s text, but it also feels here like clever artifice, not so much an organic outgrowth of this production as something lifted bodily from the Trevor Nunn version, where it seems (to me) much more apposite and in tune with the overall ambiguous tonality.

All and all, this is a very creditable production of the play that I can recommend without any particular reservations for general audiences — including those seeing the play for the first time, and certainly those wanting to see it in something like its original context.

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