The Merchant of Venice (24 page)

Henry Goodman
was born in 1950. After graduating from RADA he moved to South Africa, running Athol Fugard’s Space Theatre in Cape Town. Returning to England in the 1980s he quickly made a name for himself in a remarkably versatile range of roles, winning the Olivier Award for Best Actor in 1993 for his role in Stephen Sondheim’s
Assassins
. At the RSC his work includes
Richard III
,
Volpone, The Comedy of Errors
, and
They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?
At the National Theatre he won his second Olivier Award for his portrayal of Shylock in Trevor Nunn’s production of
The Merchant of Venice
, discussed here, as well as playing Nathan Detroit in
Guys and Dolls
, Roy Cohn in
Angels in America
, and Philip Gellburg in
Broken Glass.
In the West End his roles include
Duet for One
, Billy Flynn in
Chicago
, Freud in
Hysteria
, and Eddie in
Feelgood
, and on Broadway his work includes
Tartuffe
and
Art
.

His television and film work includes
The Damned United, Churchill
,
Colour Me Kubrick, Notting Hill, Mary Reilly
, and
The Mayor of Casterbridge
.

Shylock is a major role, but he is on stage for very few scenes, so there is little opportunity for gradual evolution of his character: is that a particular challenge?

AS:
I think that Shylock is extremely well structured as a role, with one exception (I wish he had a final scene, an Act 5 Scene 2, after all the lightweight comedy about missing rings in 5.1), but there is still ample opportunity to develop his character. To summarize: in Act 1 Scene 3, we see him as he normally is in public, treading a tightrope with the Christians, now being humble, now resentful, now darkly humorous; in Act 2 Scene 5, we see him as he is in private—paranoid and strict (as a father); in Act 3 Scene 1, we see this troubled man explode, almost splitting into two—shaken senseless by his daughter’s elopement, while rejoicing crazily at Antonio’s misfortunes; in Act 3 Scene 3, we see how he has now hardened, the split personality fused into a single immovable force; in Act 4 Scene 1, the “Trial Scene,” we see a horrible spectacle—the new monstrous Shylock ruling supreme at first, and then being cut down, piece by piece, till he is a shadow of his former self, and finally loses everything. What a journey.

HG:
No, because what you get in
Merchant
are huge events in the offstage life that forcefully inform and cause the remarkable things you see. The sparing use of the actual presence of Shylock onstage means that the huge events that happen in his family life, in his home, in his social milieu, in a broader sense socially and politically, but in a very direct sense in his daily life, are immediate and active catalysts that we witness in his development when he is onstage. For example, with the taunting of the young lads-about-town, the irritation with his servant at home, Gobbo, and then the huge upheaval in his family life after Jessica elopes with a Christian, all of these events are like an emotional tidal wave that expose the bare foundations and leave him naked and visceral. I think he’s sparingly used, but when he does come on he is just overwhelming in force to everybody else around him. In theater, as in life, situation always breeds character; how people deal with challenges, pressures, or opportunities reveals who they really are.

Villain or victim?

AS:
He is both victim and villain, strictly in that order, and epitomizes a syndrome which fascinates me, and has featured often in my work, both as an actor and a writer: the persecuted turning into the persecutor. I witnessed it in my native South Africa. In colonial times, the Boers were persecuted by the British, who, during the Anglo-Boer War, invented the concentration camp, starving and killing thousands of Boer women and children. But then when the Boers gained power, becoming the Afrikaners, they created Apartheid, and persecuted the blacks. Meanwhile, my family fled anti-Semitic persecution in Eastern Europe, settled in South Africa, gradually prospered, and ended up supporting the racist Afrikaner government. Seldom do human beings seem to learn from experience, seldom do they draw the obvious comparisons between what they have previously suffered and now go on to inflict. As with Shylock. In his first scene, he describes how the Christians treat him as a second-class citizen, their form of “kaffir”: “You call me misbeliever, cut-throat dog, / And spit upon my Jewish gaberdine.” To be spat upon is a small, physically harmless, yet particularly foul form of humiliation (as I learned during the Jew-baiting scenes in our production). Surely someone who has endured this outrage wouldn’t want it done to others? No, indeed—Shylock wants worse. He wants a pound of flesh cut from Antonio. It’s a worthless thing, inedible to man, “a weight of carrion flesh” as he says himself, but, now that he has the upper hand, this bruised and battered victim simply wants revenge of the most violent kind.

HG:
I cannot help but be deeply affected by Shakespeare, as with all his writing, showing many sides of the picture—many more than simply continuing the notion that all foreigners are evil and dangerous. He’s far more balanced and sophisticated than that, and it’s only by going more deeply into the details of the text that we can explore that. I did a great deal of reading around the history of the production and I found all that liberating, because you realize that everyone who ever played the role is trying to deal with the essential problem of whether you fall into the trap of deciding, am I villain or victim?
The key is the inner experience he is having. I feel he’s a victim of
himself
. There are many people treated harshly by life who manage to stop themselves from becoming vicious and ugly because they have the inner resources or countervailing warmth and generosity of spirit within them to offset the poison. But Shylock hasn’t—he has been poisoned by the pressure of the reality he lives in. I think we see that in the scene with Jessica and Gobbo in his home. The home, I think we should believe from Jessica’s words, is a prison. She may belong to his nation, but not to his manner, and in that wonderful speech that she has, she hates him for his hatred. It’s clearly more than natural teenage rebellion, it’s religious repression: there’s something in the orthodoxy of Shylock’s behavior that really upsets her deeply. It’s a type of fanaticism. For Shylock there’s a sense that your home is a retreat from the world. Jessica wants it to be open, to be a passport to the world in every sense. But then you have to understand that their home is in a ghetto. In this the details are important: by sunset every night you have to be inside with the doors firmly closed; if you’re not inside you have to pay a huge fine to the authorities. They are locked in on the site of an old iron foundry (the Italian is
barghetto
, where
ghetto
comes from). Every night this community of people that would have come from all over the Mediterranean, Persia, France, Jews from Europe, Russia, the Ottoman Empire and other exotic places, would have to get out of the city and into the ghetto. What binds them is an enforced identity as aliens. So they take solace from that very otherness—solace and, crucially, strength. In Shylock, a potentially villainous, fanatical, justified strength of thought, strength of righteousness. A strength that is self-harming and eventually condones, with right and God on its side, murder. There’s a wonderful book by Cecil Roth on the history of the Jews which gives a great insight into the lives of their dynamic and exciting cultures throughout Europe (in the late sixteenth century). Shakespeare doesn’t concentrate on that aspect, and this is the interesting thing: what Shakespeare does is show the effect of the political and the social on the private man. The individual tortured by society. He shows how that very society “breeds” its own monsters, monsters that will wound it deeply. Also, in a similar way, domestically: that’s why Shakespeare goes out of his way to show that this man has no
wife. Jessica
is
his wife: his daughter has to be mature beyond her years; she not only lives in a very orthodox, repressive regime, but emotionally her father is a disturbed man. He is obsessed, not just by money-making but by protecting himself from the savagery of the awfulness of the life out there on the streets. There is a psychological ghetto in the home scenes as much as the physical ghetto outside.

Though often regarded as an especially isolated character, we see Shylock with Tubal, and his family is obviously very important to him (his relationship with Jessica, his memory of his wife Leah): did you seek to convey both these aspects?

AS:
It is vitally important for the actor playing Shylock to make him as detailed and complex a character as possible, and to show his humanity. No better chance comes than when Tubal reports that Shylock’s eloped daughter, Jessica, has traded one of his rings for a monkey. Numb with shock, Shylock suddenly mentions his late wife (in the action there’s no Mrs. Shylock to help him, like there’s no Mrs. Lear or Mrs. Prospero), and he speaks with a strange, blurred eloquence: “I had it of Leah when I was a bachelor. I would not have given it for a wilderness of monkeys.” The fact that he says this to Tubal indicates a trust, a friendship between the men, and the fact that they agree to meet later at their synagogue gives a glimpse of their social and spiritual life. These may just be tiny moments, but they’re valuable.

More specifically, how did you and your Jessica play the relationship with each other?

AS:
The opportunity to play the Shylock/Jessica relationship lies not so much in their one short scene together as in its aftermath. Deborah Goodman and I played the scene rather formally, an Orthodox Jewish father and daughter; he stern, she dutiful. Then, during the elopement, she revealed how oppressed she had felt under his rule, and how liberated she was now. He, in turn, learning about her betrayal, unleashed the kind of primal passion you only feel about those closest to you: “I would my daughter were dead at my foot, and the jewels in her ear!” Later, during the banter about rings in Act 5,
Jessica became increasingly isolated, and then at the end of the play, we created an extra moment, like most modern productions do (to compensate for what I call “the missing Shylock scene”)—she dropped her newly acquired crucifix, and it was retrieved by Antonio. He held it in front of her with ambiguous intent: was he returning it, or was he questioning her right to wear it? Two lonely outsiders. He deprived of his beloved Bassanio, she of her father and her racial identity.

7.
Henry Goodman as Shylock with Gabrielle Jourdan as Jessica: huge affection, though sometimes expressed, as affection often is, in violence.

HG:
Well, the key to any hatred is love gone wrong. They love each other deeply and they need each other. But they don’t need the way the other behaves and they don’t need the other’s needs! Shylock needs Jessica to be everything that he believes in: to be respectful, true to rules and to the traditions of Jewish orthodox behavior, to live in the denial of pleasure that he lives in, against the society from which he earns his living. There is an issue, beneath the play, of moral superiority, of who’s right, the New Testament or the Old. You can say that he is learning to be a mother, and he can’t. Gabrielle Jourdan, who played Jessica, brought a huge intelligence and yearning. There wasn’t just a naughty young girl there, there was somebody who had a desire to be supportive, kind, and understanding, but also a love of life that was being stifled. We tried to show, I think instinctively, that there was huge affection between them which was expressed, as affection often is, in violence. Losing temper with the ones you love. Disturbing and treating horribly the ones you care about. Love is dysfunctionally expressed, and that is the link with the society outside. When events take the course they do, he has not got the control or that surface carapace that he normally has on the Rialto.

“Hath not a Jew eyes?” is one of those famous speeches, like “To be or not to be,” that everyone is waiting for and on which an actor perhaps needs a new angle to keep it fresh: what did you discover in the speech?

AS:
The “Hath not a Jew eyes?” speech was born out of the very center of the production: the violence of prejudice. In Act 2 Scene 8, the audience has learned that Shylock is running through the streets,
shouting: “My daughter! O my ducats! … two rich and precious stones / Stol’n by my daughter!” Also they learn that “all the boys in Venice follow him / Crying, his stones, his daughter, and his ducats.” So in Act 3 Scene 1, the director Bill Alexander and I decided to have Shylock enter in a disheveled state, his forehead bleeding (as though actually stoned by the boys), and to have Solanio and Salerio attack him, verbally and physically. Then the great speech just came out as a spontaneous and deeply felt response. Here, especially, we wanted to show the victim before he becomes the villain, the persecuted before he becomes the persecutor.