The Merchant of Venice (23 page)

TRESNJAK:
I believe that, regardless of how one chooses to stage
The Merchant of Venice
, Portia herself has a choice from the very beginning of the play. To stay in Belmont, accept her father’s will, keep her fortune, and potentially end up with a jackass of a husband. Or to leave Belmont, get disinherited, and discover her own path in the world at large. (That, too, is a common fairy-tale motif.) So, in my opinion, for all her moping in the first scene, Portia is a compromised, complicated character from the outset, and not exactly a
fairy-tale princess. In our production, I tried to highlight this by making it clear that Nerissa was a working girl, mostly supportive but at times bewildered and infuriated by Portia—especially after her racist remark about the Prince of Morocco.

It’s sometimes said that whereas Barabas in Christopher Marlowe’s
The Jew of Malta
is the stereotypical villainous Jew, Shylock is humanized, for example by “Hath not a Jew eyes?” and the reference to Leah’s ring which he would not have given away for “a wilderness of monkeys.” But you can’t get much more stereotypically villainous than threatening to cut off a pound of someone’s flesh. How did you and your Shylock reconcile this?

THACKER:
I think it’s very clear that for a large part of the play Shakespeare is reasonably hostile in his attitude to Shylock: “I hate him for he is a Christian” (Act 1 Scene 3). If someone said in a play, “I hate him because he is a Muslim,” for example, you’d think that was a pretty unpleasant line for anyone to utter. Also, “If I can catch him once upon the hip.” These things are unquestionably there in the play, so either you let them flourish or you slightly adjust them. I was enormously influenced when I directed the play by the fact that at the time I’d just directed the British premiere of Arthur Miller’s play
Broken Glass
.
Broken Glass
is essentially about a Jewish person who’s subjected to a degree of what we would now call institutional racism, and responds by trying to assimilate himself totally into New York business society by completely
denying
his Jewishness. Arthur Miller creates a counterpoint Jewish character, the doctor, who’s so completely well adjusted about his own Jewishness that at the end of the play when they come together it’s a bit of a debate on whether you assimilate or whether you don’t. That was one of the inspirations for our production, which was to allow Shylock to assimilate, or to need or want to assimilate as fully as possible within the Christian world, so that he would be able to be successful. That seemed to be a truthful way of approaching the play given where we set it. Therefore Shylock inevitably became a modern businessman, and so it all sat very comfortably.

In the play there is a suggestion that Shylock doesn’t like music,
which would be very unlikely for a modern Jewish person, particularly an educated person. That’s another element of Shylock being unsympathetic, because later in the play Lorenzo says, “The man that hath no music in himself, / Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds, / Is fit for treasons.” In our production we saw Shylock, when safely in his home, listening to music, and clearly very devout in his culture privately. At home the trappings of his own culture were present, therefore it became even clearer why Shylock, a devout, sensitive, and serious man, would have such difficulty with drunken lager-louts and Christians, and, just like there were in the 1980s, serious money-type city slickers, and why he would not want his daughter to be involved in any of that.

When Shylock finds out about his daughter having eloped, it’s very clear and it would be very difficult to avoid if you played the complete text, that he is more worried about losing his money than losing his daughter. Therefore we had some judicious pruning which actually addressed that balance and made clear he was more worried the other way around. David Calder played it that the realization that his daughter had left him was the most terrible thing that had happened to him; for example, he ripped his clothes, as Jewish people do when someone is dead. She was effectively dead to him, it was the worst possible kind of betrayal.

In a post-Holocaust world, one of the things that I think was very powerful and very successful about the production was that it worked almost as an analogy for the state of Israel, and the fact that after the Holocaust one could almost forgive any mistake of Israel. But in the course of doing that, what happens is the oppressed becomes the oppressor. So the bombing of Gaza, for example, isn’t a valid response to the Holocaust. In a similar kind of way it became very clear in our production that Shylock was oppressed. The costume design was absolutely crucial here because he started off by trying to assimilate as much as possible into the Venetian world, but after his daughter was taken away he became more and more orthodox. He went from being a man in a suit and there being no trace of his Jewishness, to, by the end of the play, being dressed almost like an orthodox Jew, and being guilty of very, very cold-hearted savagery. David Calder had a wonderful idea, which was to actually mark out
the place, with a felt-tip pen, on Antonio’s heart, where he was going to cut the flesh. By this time this was an act of such cold-hearted revenge that I now think what the production successfully revealed—and I’m not sure I believe it to be true in its intention, but the production made it very clear—was that Shylock, having been oppressed so terribly, gets to breaking point and then becomes a man whose actions have to be stopped. There has to be another way, and that way is the quality of mercy, the quality of forgiveness. I think you get from Portia this wonderful, very passionate plea for mercy in a modern world. The production was very highly rated in Israel, because they felt it was a truthful demonstration of how the oppressed becomes the oppressor.

TRESNJAK:
The only answer that I can give is a theatrical one and not a bit rational. But if it all came down to being rational we certainly would not need theater, and I think that Shakespeare understood the appeal of the irrational gesture on stage more than any playwright before or since. I think that Shylock unleashes a hurt, isolated, and vengeful part inside of all of us, and I can’t say that either F. Murray Abraham or I tried to soften his jagged edges. It is one of those strange paradoxical roles where you gain the audience’s sympathy by not asking for it. The worst thing to do is try to be ingratiating. In the universe of
The Merchant of Venice
, Shylock’s quest for the pound of flesh cuts through the layers of hypocrisy. Theatrically, it is as potent and as irrational as the statue of Hermione coming to life at the end of
The Winter’s Tale
. But it connects to a different, darker side of our fantasy life, the desire to maim as opposed to heal.

“The quality of mercy” is one of the great speeches in Shakespeare, but does Portia’s (cross-dressed) courtroom performance come from the same place in her as her behavior and language in Belmont?

TRESNJAK:
I don’t think that Portia could have uttered “The quality of mercy” speech before meeting Bassanio. The first moment that we see them together on stage, she speaks her other famous monologue (“I pray you tarry. Pause a day or two …”). I think that Shakespeare is telling us something about the transformative power of
love. It makes Portia more eloquent. It gives her courage to go on a big adventure, travel to Venice, put on a disguise, and save the day. But the irony is that she knows so little about Venice, Shylock, Antonio, and even her new husband. And by the end of the scene, her plea for mercy will seem rather perverse.

In
Shakespeare After All
, Marjorie Garber writes: “on the level of sheer beauty of language and power of dramaturgy, the play is disturbingly appealing, just at those moments when one might wish it to be unappealing. The most magnificent of its speeches are also, in some ways, the most wrongheaded.” I thought about this notion throughout the rehearsal process, especially during the trial scene, where we see Portia at her most eloquent and her most ignorant.

Lancelet Gobbo is not Shakespeare’s most memorable clown, but he at the very least has an important structural role, doesn’t he?

THACKER:
I was very lucky indeed to have a wonderfully gifted comic actor, Chris Luscombe, who’s now a director, playing Lancelet Gobbo. I did think, “How am I going to make this work in a modern dress production?” It was one of the things I just couldn’t see working. We did cut quite a lot to help it along, but he made it work brilliantly, he was so funny and so real, and I have to say all the credit has to go to him. He solved the problem for me, and he was utterly credible within the context of this play. I was a very lucky director to find someone who made a very tricky situation not only not difficult, but effortlessly real and funny.

TRESNJAK:
I find him intriguing because he seems like a rather ambitious young clown. From Shylock to Bassanio to Belmont, he pops up all over the place. He is both literally and upwardly mobile. He’ll do well.

Lorenzo and Jessica: why does Shakespeare take them to Belmont and give them that poetic and musical exchange at the beginning of the fifth act?

THACKER:
Bear in mind this is quite an early play in Shakespeare’s development as a playwright. As he got older he was able to bring
things to a harmonious conclusion in a way that came completely organically out of the play. I think Act 5 has fundamentally a healing function. That’s why it is so beautiful and so poetic and should be, I think, very real and very moving. It’s hard to get right, but it should be a transition into healing. But of course there are two characters in it who are uncomfortable: one is Jessica, because of her betrayal of her roots and her father, and the other is Antonio, because of the trauma he’s just been through and his being left on the stage by himself when everyone else is paired up. He is the only man left there, the gay man when all the couples have gone off and happily got married, so there’s a bittersweet moment there, but I think these are subtle nuances that should be allowed to be there without banging them into people’s faces.

TRESNJAK:
I find that this is the hardest scene to write about and the most intriguing scene to stage. One can interpret it and stage it a hundred different ways, all of them equally valid. But regardless of the staging, there is something genuinely startling and heartbreaking about hearing such gorgeous poetry after the appalling ending of the trial scene. The radical shift in tone is its own reward. Near the end of their exchange, Lorenzo speaks three lines that, to me, were the thesis statement for our production:

Is there a risk of the final act, with the business of exchanging rings, sagging after the drama of the courtroom scene, particularly as audiences who aren’t familiar with the play might expect the courtroom scene to represent its climax?

THACKER:
I think that Shakespeare’s imagination probably ran away with him: that he loved so much the writing of Shylock, and he turns out to be such a wonderful character, that you might think that in one sense the play is unbalanced in terms of what was probably the original impulse to write it. How the audience reacts to Shylock
being made a Christian is pretty crucial. I think Shakespeare probably thought of it as a good thing, a gift. It’s very difficult for our modern sensibilities to accept that and the natural consequence of that action was for the audience to be shocked at that point. I was very happy for them to be shocked, but we tried to make it clear that Portia was herself shocked at the outcome. Portia gives Shylock every possible chance. We tried to make that completely clear in the play—she gives him so many opportunities to be forgiving that he doesn’t take.

TRESNJAK:
I think that the effectiveness of the final act depends entirely on the choices that are made during the trial scene. At the very least, Portia and Nerissa are going to hear Bassanio and Gratiano profess that their esteem for Antonio is greater than their love for their new wives. In addition to that, Shakespeare gives Gratiano the most vicious attacks on Shylock. Add to that the possibility that Portia notices some homoerotic overtones in Bassanio’s interactions with Antonio. Then there is also the possibility that Nerissa may not approve of Portia’s actions during the trial. And the result is a fifth act that’s brimming with tensions: between Portia and Nerissa; Portia and Bassanio; Nerissa and Gratiano; and Portia and Antonio. (The moment when Portia welcomes Antonio to Belmont strikes me as wonderfully curt and cryptic.) In our production, I thought of the last act as a brief reversal of
The Taming of the Shrew
, or
The Shaping of the Husbands
, as I like to call it. I think the audience truly enjoyed watching Bassanio and Gratiano squirm when Portia and Nerissa went after them.

At the end of our
Merchant
, the three couples went off to party and Antonio was left alone, contemplating Shylock’s yarmulke that, earlier in the scene, fell out of Portia’s pocket. I wanted to show that, by the end of the play, both Shylock and Antonio are outsiders.

Sir Antony Sher
was born in Cape Town in 1949, and trained as an actor at the Webber Douglas academy in London. He joined the
Liverpool Everyman theater in the 1970s, working with a group of gifted young actors and writers which included Willy Russell, Alan Bleasdale, Julie Walters, Trevor Eve, and Jonathan Pryce. He joined the RSC in 1982 and played the title role in
Tartuffe
and the Fool in
King Lear
. In 1984 he won both the Evening Standard and Laurence Olivier awards for his performance in the RSC’s
Richard III
. Since then he has played numerous leading roles in the theater as well as on film and television, including
Stanley
and
Primo
at the National Theatre and on Broadway (
Stanley
winning him a second Olivier Award, and
Primo
two New York Awards), and, at the RSC,
Tamburlaine
,
Cyrano de Bergerac
, and
Macbeth
, as well as Prospero in
The Tempest
, Iago in
Othello
, and Shylock in
The Merchant of Venice
, directed by Bill Alexander, which he discusses here. He also writes books and plays, including the theatrical memoirs
Year of the King
(1985),
Woza Shakespeare: Titus Andronicus in South Africa
(1997, cowritten with his partner Gregory Doran), and his autobiography,
Beside Myself
(2001). As an artist, his recent exhibitions have included the London Jewish Cultural Centre (2007) and the National Theatre (2009).