Northern Broadsides' Merchant of Venice is highly enjoyable. Perhaps it is a little too enjoyable. It gives a benign comic gloss to Shakespeare's play, in which almost everyone behaves badly, from the Jew-baiting Christians to Shylock demanding his pound of flesh. There are times when Barrie Rutter's sometimes over-emphatically spoken Shylock looks as if he was auditioning for Fagin in Oliver! This show, though, has its share of song and dance.
A Merchant that fails to confront the deep anti-semitism of the play must on some level be a Merchant that fails. Yet, as with all of Northern Broadsides' productions, there is a real generosity of spirit and simplicity in the way the play is presented. The company's direct playing style works better on a traditional cross-arch space than I had ever dared to hope. If you had never seen The Merchant of Venice and didn't know the story, this is a production that conveys it perfectly. The tension when Paul Barnhill's fallible Bassanio chooses the casket that will lose or win him Portia, or when Shylock sharpens his knife the better to cut Antonio, has you on the edge of your seat.
At its worst, this production fails to make a case for a play that is so out of step with our political consciousness; at its best, it simply delivers up the characters and says, this is how people behave, this is human nature. Bassanio's gang of followers show how the laddish group could so easily turn into a mob; there is something essentially base in Adam Sunderland's Lorenzo, who steals Shylock's daughter from him; and the glee of everyone in the court when Shylock is thwarted turns him into a genuinely tragic figure - a flawed, suffering human being, not a racial stereotype.
· Until Saturday. Box office: 01483 440000. Then touring.
