Theatre: The Merchant of Venice (★★★)

By William Shakespeare
Bell Shakespeare
Director Anne-Louise Sarks
Designer Michael Hankin
Lighting designer Paul Jackson
Composer and Sound designer Max Lyandvert
Featuring Jo Turner, Damien Stouthos, Fayssal Bazzi, Shiv Palekar, Jessica Tovey, Catherine Davies, Mitchell Butel, Jacob Warnet, Felicity McKay and Eugene Gilfedder
Heath Ledger Theatre
Until August 26

The first clue to how this Merchant of Venice was to be treated was not long in coming, and impossible to miss.
The characters kneel in sombre rows for the Lord’s Prayer, while, in their midst, two figures, non-participants in the rituals of devotion and power, stand faithless the midst of the faithful.
Shylock, the Jewish financier, and his daughter Jessica.
So, as it has been for two centuries at least (though it was not intended to be originally), Shakespeare’s crafty little romantic comedy is, instead, made to be about the grinding against each other of culture and belief and the scouring of the outsider.
Harold Bloom puts it perfectly; The Merchant of Venice is not a play about Anti-Semitism – it is simply a profoundly anti-Semitic play. And the problem when staging it, the clash of modern sensibility and four-centuries-old theatre-making, is wrapped up in Shylock.
It’s worth remembering that the next play Shakespeare brought to the stage was Henry IV; Falstaff, the great deviser, was just around the corner. Shylock is no Falstaff, but the power of independent personality, soon to explode in the fat old knight, is in him, and, ironically, he fatally unbalances the play.