The Merchant of Venice – Tower Theatre

Writer: William Shakespeare

Director: David Taylor

The Tower Theatre reopens with a new programme including a couple of Shakespeare plays running in succession. Its Merchant of Venice relocates the action to the twentieth century.

In support of his friend Bassanio, merchant Antonio makes a bargain with moneylender Shylock and, certain of his impending riches, agrees a pound of flesh in surety. While Bassanio pursues the beautiful heiress Portia whose father has left an unusual husband-choosing riddle, Antonio’s prospects sink, and the stage is set for retribution.

David Taylor’s production for the Tower Theatre has some moments of brilliance with shrewd design choices by Peter Foster that create a swimming pool from patterned cloth, a fun dance with the caskets and a rapidly assembled court room that creates just the right feeling of proximity and formality. There are also some meaningful interpretations of the poisonous context of Venice that makes Shylock’s position untenable.

Yet elsewhere, scenes slip by without properly establishing either the secondary story or any deeper characterisation beyond a couple of the principals. The lacklustre romance between Lorenzo and Jessica fades into the background, the various friends, servants and local gossips consume plenty of stage time without fully justifying their contribution and, with a 2.5 hour running time, Taylor’s production struggles to justify not cutting and shaping the story to create drive and narrative purpose.

There are lots of threads here that aren’t fully elaborated; the setting seems to be the 1940s or thereabouts, but a late nineteenth century telephone makes an early appearance as well as a few contemporary stylings, and much is made of soldiers marching across the stage at the start and end. But other than a single uniformed character, the relevance of military society to the choices, behaviours and limitations of life in Venice is never considered.

Ian Recordon’s Shylock has the best of the performances with a pleading, imploring take on his most famous speech, creating considerable empathy for Shylock’s perspective when surrounded by such prejudice. Nisha Emich is a commanding Portia holding the rest of the show together despite a lack of chemistry with Dale Robertson’s Bassanio who appears to have wandered in from an Oscar Wilde play, while Axel Kenge finds just the right comic tone for his Prince of Morocco.

Badged as a socially distant performance, sadly the Tower were unable to comply with their own measures with latecomers sat directly next to audience members already bunched by the door, less than 10% following mask-wearing guidance (which if you’d booked a socially distanced performance, you are likely to expect) and no social distancing observed in the rest of the building. It’s great that this is offered to those less comfortable with the return to full capacity venues, but it needs to be much clearer what this means in practice.

Runs until 11 September 2021