Venice and water are the key themes at Chichester this year. Designer Alison Chitty has turned the main stage into a pool containing 9,800 litres of water, which can be covered or revealed as needed. But, although it is an innovative installation, it cannot disguise the lightweight nature of Gale Edwards's production.
Each scene is played on a series of rearranged wooden islets. This is appropriate for Venice, but destructive of narrative fluidity. And, in order to cover each restructuring of the stage by the gum-booted crew, Edwards creates a whole series of visual distractions.
Some, such as the sight of Portia and Nerissa being strapped up to achieve token manhood, are undeniably interesting. But others, such as a moment in which dark-suited Venetians ring the stage perimeter, chanting "Jew, Jew, Jew", fail to develop organically from the production itself.
The main problem, for all the modern dress and watery setting, is the lack of any defined context. While Trevor Nunn's production grew out of 1930s fascism and Bill Alexander's out of a historicised ghetto, Edwards's version exists in a decorative limbo.
This is as much a play about money as race and religion. But here there is little sense of Venice as an international trading centre or of Belmont as a walled fortress of privilege. Characters converse on their separate islands, but you never get much idea of the financial or social nexus that binds them together.
Fortunately, the lead performers mostly overcome the production's imprecision. Desmond Barrit's Homburg-hatted Shylock is, by implication, an assimilated businessman who has learned to live with prejudice and who returns to his faith only when cornered. But, although Barrit is a commanding presence, I doubt the wisdom of interpolating a scene in which, in his grief, he stumbles into a canal. We become more concerned with his ducking than his ducats.
Niamh Cusack is a poised, witty Portia, who is allowed one telling moment of spotlit desolation when she realises where the affections of Patrick Robinson's Bassanio truly lie. But it is a measure of the production's political nervousness that Portia's insultingly racist comment on the Prince of Morocco is amended to "let all who are so gilded choose me so".
You feel throughout that Edwards has never quite grasped the nettle. She gives us occasional glimpses of the moral ugliness of the Venetians, as in a short scene where Shylock is menacingly harried in torchlit alleys. But mostly this is a production that seeks pictorial solutions to the play's notorious problems, and that uses water as a weapon of mass distraction.
· In rep until October 2. Box office: 01243 781312.
