The Merchant of Venice
The Linbury at the Royal Opera House, London WC2
Tom Stoppard was so impressed with the work that the Shakespeare Schools Festival is doing (on 3 July, 400 schools will be performing Shakespeare in 100 theatres across Britain) that he asked if he could help. In this way, he became the abridger of The Merchant of Venice, performed by the National Youth Theatre in collaboration with the Shakespeare Schools Festival.
The show lasts 40 minutes; the pound of flesh has been reduced to a couple of ounces but with Stoppard in charge of the scales, the story survives. The curious thing is that the merchant, an under-realised character in the original, here gains weight while Shylock, less ideally, loses it. Tom Raphael-Eves's merchant was excellent: relaxedly authoritative. And Gavin Fowler, the youngest, freshest Shylock you will ever see, may shortly receive a fan letter from my 13-year-old son, Leo, who was in awe of Shylock's complexity and this boy's mastery of the part.
Paul Roseby's delightful, polished production gladdened the heart. It was marvellous to see such a distillation of young talent (from 14 to 18). A radiant Portia (Yolanda Kettle) saw to it that the quality of mercy was in no way strained. Nerissa (Francesca Zoutewelle) was lovely, too - and the evening full of lively innovation.
I especially enjoyed Nerissa's deliberately dire singing, warning Bassanio off the wrong caskets. Throughout, the cast made ingenious use of an alphabet of letters as props. But it was only at the end that these resolved themselves into a single word, a golden signature: Shakespeare.
