Review: The Merchant of Venice, at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon
Rarely can there have been a darker, more menacing and ultimately unhinged production of The Merchant of Venice.
RSC associate director Rupert Goold has relocated the conspicuous consumption of Venice to a modernish-day Vegas, where the commercial degradation of love is brutally dissected.
If the Bard had lived in Wisteria Lane and been a fan of The Sopranos, this may well have been how he would have envisaged this spiteful, distasteful tale of a derided money-lending Jew.
Shylock is a sharp-suited casino boss with eyes on property speculation. The security cameras in his office relay the action on the crap tables.
Gold sprayed palm trees frame the stage. Launcelot Gobbo, played by Jamie Beamish, is a washed-up Elvis impersonator whose crooning is played for laughs – until it all ends in tears with Portia’s psychological collapse.
This truly is a physical and moral landscape where all that glisters is not gold. (The famous line is bastardised to the popular “all that glitters,” presumably to get up the noses of windbag traditionalists.)
The updating of the action makes the play’s anti-semitism all the more shocking.
Even Portia, who until the courtroom scene has been played as a wise-cracking, “knotty” Southern belle, has a particularly vindictive way of addressing Shylock when the usurer’s world comes crashing down. The humiliated “inhuman wretch” gets gobbed on as he shambles away.
The notion of Western society’s casual, vindictive racism is played to the full. When one of Portia’s three suitors, the Prince of Morocco, takes to the stage for the casket test he is lampooned as a pretty-boy boxer in shimmering gold shorts.
