How does one solve the problems inherent in the Merchant of Venice? By giving the action a specific emotional and social context. That was the technique adopted by such directors as Bill Alexander, Peter Zadek and Peter Sellars; and it is precisely the one employed by Trevor Nunn in this affecting and moving production.
Nunn sets the action squarely in a modern Venetian cafe society: a world where Antonio tinkles the ivories, where the young Christians go to watch louche cabaret shows and where the fugitive Launcelot Gobbo somewhat improbably does his own stand-up act.
But against this world of Christian hedonism Nunn posits an equally strong world of Hebraic faith: one where Shylock observes the Sabbath rituals, reads from the Torah, speaks Yiddish to his daughter. It is exactly the clash between two value-systems that gives this production its tension.
But what Nunn makes clear is that Shylock's hunger for revenge stems from Christian example. All Antonios treat Shylock with derision. But when David Bamber's merchant here tells Shylock to lend money to his enemy "who, if he break, thou mayst with better face exact the penalty", he is issuing a kind of aggressive moral challenge. And this moment finds its strange echo in the trial scene when Bamber's Antonio, released from death, brandishes the justice scales in Shylock's face before demanding he convert to Christianity.
In other words, Nunn presents us with a genuine clash of wills, value-systems and revenge-motifs. You are not asked to sympathise with Henry Goodman's excellent Shylock: you are simply asked to understand him. Goodman also brings to the role a genuine moral gravity masked by ironic humour. Sometimes the director's love of novelistic detail seems a bit excessive. I'm not sure we need Portia's home movies of her previous wooers nor the send up of the Prince of Aragon as a poncy Spaniard. But by giving the play a specific context, Nunn rescues it from fairytale whimsy or visible anti-semitism.
Instead what we get is a play about the ubiquity of money, about a world where secular Christian lightness comes up against a fierce Hebraic severity and where the one quality that both sides recognise in each other is the unquenchable thirst for revenge. In short, a challenging and disturbing production.
