Reviews 2007
Reviews 2007
✭✩✩✩✩
by William Shakespeare, directed by Richard Rose
Stratford Festival, Festival Theatre, Stratford
June 1-October 27, 2007
"The Man That Hath No Music in Himself"
If you want to experience Stratford at its finest, do not see “The Merchant of Venice”. Besides ghastly design and frivolous direction, it features some of the most leaden reading of Shakespearean verse this side of a high school classroom. The cast does include the great First Nations actor Graham Greene in the role of Shylock, but this is neither his finest moment nor that of anyone else.
This is a concept production but no one in the creative team seems to have decided exactly what the concept is. The most immediately off-putting aspect is Phillip Clarkson’s design. In a short statement in the programme he says, “Our costumes show a Venice in conflict between old and new values. It is globalized, market-driven, but still deeply religious. So the clothes combine contemporary couture with Renaissance looks”. The result is a wide range of design ideas in bizarre and what seem to be random combinations. Antonio’s suit coat has a skirt hanging from it and later his jacket is held together by crossing and buttoning the lapels. Portia wears a nice enough gown when we first meet her if we can ignore the cascade of extra fabric that falls behind her from the waist and bunches up on the ground. Portia’s maids wear petticoat frames outside their uniforms. Portia and Nerissa disguised as lawyers wear jackets where one side of the front hangs about a foot lower than the other. Lorenzo seems to be got up to play cricket. When Jessica disguises herself as a boy, she somehow finds an all-black leather suit and cap in the house, and so forth.
This is a play where differences of class and religion are of the highest importance. Clarkson’s costumes do not make these clear and do not even link related characters to each other. They do not tell us where the play is set or when although we guess it must be sometime in the future when the moneyed classes have totally lost their fashion sense. The disco music Michael Vieira had composed for scene changes and dances also provides no clue to the setting.
The production’s visual confusion is just a sign of the muddle-headedness that characterizes the whole show. One might have thought there was a point to casting Graham Greene as Shylock. When his Shylock speaks of “my tribe” it does take on a different meaning and when we see how the Christians’ break his bond, or we might say “treaty”, parallels with North American history come to mind. Rather, they would come to mind if Rose laid any emphasis on them, but the ahistorical costuming and placing of Greene in skullcap and prayer shawl work against them.
Rose’s position on the religious content of the play is not even clear. He begins with a party for Antonio as a mock Last Supper set for thirteen where, however, it seems a golden calf is being celebrated. During the trial scene Antonio is drawn out on the floor in the form of a cross. How is it appropriate to portray the most anti-Semitic character in the play as a Christ-figure? When Shylock discovers the loss of both Jessica and his money, Rose directs Greene to emphasize the money more than his daughter in his cries. In a scene at a market we see three booths. Jews are advertising currency exchanges, an Arab is selling arms via computer and a Christian is hawking kitschy religious souvenirs. It appears that Rose’s way of dealing with the anti-Semitism in the play is to portray both Judaism and Christianity, with Islam thrown in for good measure, in a negative light.
Even with such confusion, good performances could help salvage the production, but, with few exceptions, there are none. Scott Wentworth as Antonio, Bernard Hopkins as Old Gobbo, Brian Tree as Tubal and John Innes as the Duke of Venice know how make sense of Shakespearean verse and it shows. The rest of the cast speaks Shakespeare’s words but its combination of indistinct diction, poorly chosen pauses and random emphases make speech after speech come out as gobbledygook. Jean-Michel Le Gal completely massacres Lorenzo’s beautiful speech in Act 5 concerning, ironically, “The man that hath no music in himself”, and Rose has Severn Thomson’s Portia read Portia’s famous speech about “the quality of mercy” from a piece of paper she finds on the desk. It’s painfully clear that Rose has given the cast little help with interpretation the text and a feeling of tedium and anger grows at hearing a cast uttering three hours of poetry they don’t understand.
Wentworth plays Antonio as a deeply flawed man, capable of generosity to individual men but not to humanity as a whole. Greene, best known for film and television roles, is not lost on stage but does not appear comfortable. He has not expanded the small-scale acting that works on film to the larger scale needed for the stage and especially the Festival Theatre. Sean Arbuckle’s Bassanio is dashing and pleasant but not much more than that. Rose has decided that Lorenzo is a fortune hunter and nothing more. Gareth Potter’s Gratiano is unremarkable. Ron Kennell’s Launcelot Gobbo blusters so much as to be annoying. Unlike Richard Monette’s notorious “Merchant” in 2001, Rose at least allows Jamie Robinson to play the Prince of Morocco with some sense of dignity, though he still encourages Tim MacDonald’s Prince of Aragon to be the usual flamenco-dancing cartoon.
It is depressing to see Thompson who has given so many fine performances at the Shaw Festival reduced to playing Portia as an airhead, an idea that hardly makes sense given the trial scene. Rose has her become so taken with the Prince of Morocco, even exiting arm in arm with him, that when Bassanio’s turn at the caskets comes around it is as if she suddenly remembers she supposed to be in love with him. Raquel Duffy unaccountably plays Nerissa with a Valley Girl attitude.
One leaves the performance with the strong impression that Richard Rose dislikes the play and can’t be bothered to try to make sense of it. If this is true, we shouldn’t be bothered to see it. Given the poor design, performances and direction, anyone who chooses this play as the one Shakespeare to see at Stratford will leave feeling cheated.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Graham Greene as Shylock. ©Richard Bain.
2007-06-15
The Merchant of Venice