We’ve lately had a mass of Merchants. Following Rupert Goold’s vivacious Las Vegas version at the Almeida and Jonathan Pryce’s richly realised Shylock at Shakespeare’s Globe, Polly Findlay’s new RSC production seems thinly conceived and visibly undercast. It’s not helped by a design by Johannes Schütz that, with its mirrored back wall and swinging pendulum-like ball, fails to anchor the play in any specific location.
That lack of social context inevitably affects the performances. Makram J Khoury, a distinguished Palestinian-Israeli actor, is given no chance to register either Shylock’s financial status or religious intensity: he simply becomes a much spat-upon old man in a blue cardigan who turns a bit nasty when the chance arises. The production never begins to explore the tension between Shylock’s role as social victim and domestic tyrant.
Even Patsy Ferran, who made a big impression as Jim in the National’s Treasure Island, seems somewhat muted as Portia. Her best moment comes in the trial scene when, shocked to realise there are three people in her marriage as Bassanio devouringly kisses the doomed Antonio, she transfers her anger to the ruthless pursuit of Shylock; having previously preached the virtue of mercy, she proceeds to show none herself.
The only intense relationship in this production, in fact, is between Bassanio and Antonio, whom Jamie Ballard plays not as the usual sad stoic but as a borderline hysteric who greets the prospect of Shylock’s knife with an abject, whimpering terror.
While that’s an interesting reading, nothing much else in this production adds up. There is no clear social or psychological definition of the characters, the verse is drably spoken and only Marc Tritschler’s choral music, with its Renaissance echoes, gives any hint the play is taking place in Venice rather than Vladivostok or Venezuela.
• At Royal Shakespeare theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, until 2 September. Box office: 0844 800 1110.
