A Merchant of Venice

 The Merchant is set in Las Vegas. My partner thought I wouldn’t like it. He was wrong. I loved it. First of all, I thought the ideas came from the text. Secondly, I wished I had thought about these ideas when I taught the play for GCSE and A Level. I didn’t.

Las Vegas is about gambling (established at the beginning and before the dialogue begins. Make sure you’re in your seats at least 10 minutes before the start time). Antonio gambles with his money in argosies. Bassanio gambles for Portia in the casket game. Shylock gambles on a naive reading of the law. Portia and Nerissa gamble on a silly psychological game of the rings. Even Launcelot Gobbo gambles on being with the right religion because he doesn’t care about either. He only cares about Elvis. At the end it’s possible that Portia gambled at reading the emotional and psychological dimensions of the suit for her correctly; she might not have done. Brilliant! And complex.

Then, now and whenever are all muddled up, intertwined, and time becomes irrelevant. Portia is filmed for a ghastly TV programme with her suitors. She is a great performer and hates the show.  She, a Texan hussy heiress,  is on the make. Bassanio is on the make (why had I not seen this from the text when he makes absolutely clear that he is wooing Portia because she is ‘richly left’and because he has lost (squandered?) his money?). Antonio is on the make. He is gambling in a casino even though all his money is in his argosies. Shylock is on the make because he thinks he can get one over on the Christians.

These ghastly materialists all lose out. What is unusual and what I had never thought of before is that the only one who is in the same place at the end as at the beginning is Antonio. He is alone, gambling at the beginning. He is alone at the end. And Scott Handy, with an expressionless face, distant blocking and sometimes quite flat delivery, played him as boring and unattractive. Not the dishy, betrayed guy that the gays can feel sorry for. It isn’t the way I would have asked someone to play the part. It was much more interesting than I could have thought of. If Bassanio was in love with him (as one friend who saw it thought), then there was no obvious reason except money. Idea and theme again.

There are some very unexpected things. You don’t expect Launcelot Gobbo to be an Elvis Impersonator in a casino. You don’t expect that the caskets are the basis of a TV game show where the winner gets the Texan dollybird heiress. You don’t expect that the first half Portia will manage to be Balthazar at all – that’s a good gin and tonic topic for discussion. You also don’t expect the ending. Maybe I will add something to this blog towards the end of the run, but I don’t want to put my ideas in your head before you see it. But I can pretty well guarantee that you will come out at the end asking each other “Well, what did that mean, then?”

And there’s Patrick Stewart as Shylock. He’s a bigot (but so is this Antonio). He can be very charming. His mafia friends who are involved in the Las Vegas meat business no doubt find him so. And he has some dignity. I was delighted and surprised at Stewart’s restraint. It made his character much more credible than Shylock often is, and less of a stereotype, I thought it was a wonderful performance in a production which had many fascinating performances.

Here are some questions to think about while you’re seeing it:

           We know what Bassanio’s motive is – to marry a “lady richly left”. What is Portia’s?

           What is the relationship between Antonio and Bassanio?

           What do Lorenzo and Jessica think they are up to?

           Does anyone come out with any moral credit at the end?

I thought this was a very fine production and one of the RSC’s most coherently conceptual for a long time. I shall certainly be seeing it several more times.

Macbeth

To be perfectly honest, a few years ago I decided that I’d seen enough productions of Macbeth to last me for my lifetime, but because we only moved to Stratford eighteen months ago we thought we would go and see the RSC’s Macbeth as it’s part of the new season.

It’s certainly interesting. I wouldn’t recommend it to someone who doesn’t know Shakespeare’s play because if you don’t know the play there are several things which will confuse you mightily. For starters there aren’t any witches. There are three children instead and the word ‘witches’ that Shakespeare wrote comes out as ‘children’. There’s no ‘bubble, bubble, toil and trouble’ and no sailor’s wife with chestnuts in her lap. No one went to Aleppo. The child actors playing the ‘children’ turn up later playing Lady Macduff’s children. At the end one of them is dressed up as one of the non-witch children but the other two aren’t. I tried and tried for an idea, but I couldn’t find one. Maybe I’m dim.

The interval is placed in the middle of the Banquo’s ghost banquet scene (though without any sign of a banquet and without any sitting down). Banquo is already dead but he comes in and kills Macbeth. Then it’s time for a gin and tonic. After the drink (perhaps the best metaphor of the evening) the scene is replayed without Banquo but with Macbeth doing his writhing in the same way. Even the dim in the audience can work out that Macbeth is now mad. He can’t tell the difference between his guilty imaginings (perhaps his thoughts which are ‘but fantastical’) and the pretend reality which Shakespeare asks us to believe in his play. It is established at this point that Macbeth is ‘mad’ (whatever that means in psychological terms). And he remains mad for the rest of the play. He is haunted by those he has killed. We know this because the dead people keep coming on stage. It’s a sort of idea, I suppose. The trouble is that Lady Macbeth’s madness is relegated to mere plot.

Jonathan Slinger did his best with Macbeth, I thought. He spent quite a lot of time in Act V on a ladder. The director wanted us to see Macbeth as isolated and alone and so he was isolated and alone a lot of time time. Up a ladder. The battle was, presumably, in his head because there wasn’t any military battle. I was struck by the decision to have the branches of Birnham Wood carried by Lady Macduff (why?) and the children/”children” [?]: a sort of semi-repeated idea which by now for me had become reductive.

I have always found Act IV scene iii very boring. I’m afraid I thought that this Malcolm was dreadful. I couldn’t make out some of what he said and even when I knew the speeches (I’ve taught Macbeth about 15 times) I couldn’t make head or tail of what he was saying and cared even less. Macduff was well played though, with some emotion and subtlety, and that prevented me from walking out.

What in Cardenio had been a very well handled, and often surprisingly dramatic, technique of pausing before the crucial word became a meaningless and idiotic mannerism in this production. It sounded as if the actors had been told to do it without thinking about why. It sometimes garbled the verse and led to unintelligibility. I very much hope this new and very obvious vocal technique isn’t going to be a new RSC trademark.

I didn’t like this production. But it’s certainly got some ideas and it’s trying to do something. It also makes you read the text again. But I thought the main ideas were imposed on the text rather than arising from it: a startling contrast to A Merchant of Venice where the ideas come directly from the text.

But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t see it. It makes you think about what Shakespeare wrote again. And it’s well enough carried out to do that.

Cardenio

On first hearing about it, it seemed to me that the reconstruction of a lost play by Shakespeare and Fletcher, via an eighteenth century text by “piddling Theobald” and company collaborations from a literal translation from Spanish, would be little more than a muddled, inconsistent hotchpotch.

I was wrong. Cardenio is gripping. It’s splendidly acted, beautifully costumed and extremely well paced. In fact the RSC has unearthed a new star and given the audience the pleasure of seeing two splendid young actresses.

Much of the plot has familiar early Jacobean features. Elder brother, Don Pedro, is a fine successor to his father as Duke while younger brother, Don Fernando, is a profligate who rapes  the farmer’s daughter, Dorotea, with whom he is obsessed,  but then betrays his friend, Cardenio, by threatening to rape the woman Cardenio loves, Luscinda, and then arranges to marry her. Cardenio goes mad, Luscinda hides in a convent and Dorotea runs off to find Ferdando. All is resolved at the end. Sort of.

Greg Doran enlivens the fast moving production with music and dances (very good they are, too) and some Spanish carnival elements including fireworks which make the audience jump.

Oliver Rix is superb as Cardenio. It’s hard to believe that this is his professional stage debut. Vocally rich and varied (I heard every word – unusual for me with my ageing ears), physically agile, fit chested (lots of flesh to be seen) and brilliant in the mad scenes. No silly walks here. He is mentally ill, and convincingly. Lucy Briggs-Owen is very fine, too. She has lots to do and say and manages to project a range of emotions, mirrored in some beautiful movement. She also has the best dress you are likely to see this year. I was mightily impressed with Pippa Nixon as Dorotea, too. She has a ridiculously difficult role because she is the slighted woman who disguises herself as a boy in order to pursue the toad who promised to marry her. As Greg Doran says in the programme, it is very difficult for the audience to accept that she displays any sense in pursuing Fernando, especially as Alex Hassell plays him as an immoral shit bordering on the evil. It is even more difficult to believe it when she professes undying love for Fernando at the end, but there is something about this Dorotea that convinces. She is psychologically complex rather than a misguided fool.

I loved the ending of the play. The reconciliation scene is a hanky moment but the audience has mixed emotions, too, or at least I did. I tried at the time to explain Dorotea’s loyalty as some sort of religious allegory but I’m not sure this is right. It’s more like the typical Shakespearian ending where all seems happy but you’re left with things to think and worry about. In King Lear I am left dubious about Edgar’s whitewash speech at the end, in The Merchant of Venice I notice there is no happy solution for Antonio and in The Winter’s Tale I remember that Leontes’s son is still dead. This is the stuff that Shakespeare is made of.

Go see it.

You will get a warm welcome, too, at Moss Cottage if you do.

The Tempest in Stratford

Just occasionally theatre can deliver an experience which is sheer magic. It doesn’t happen all that often and sometimes the magic only lasts a brief while or in snatches.

Such is the case with two of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s productions which have opened the new theatre in Stratford. Kathryn Hunter produced all kinds of extraordinary magic in her performance of Cleopatra and, even though she has been replaced for the last performances ,there is still much to enjoy about the production. There is more magic in King Lear. Greg Hicks has grown in the part of Lear during the course of a long run and provides some quite wonderful moments, particularly with the incomparable Geoffrey Freshwater as Gloucester. The scene at the end where they meet up is very moving. So is the relationship between Gloucester and Poor Tom (played with great flexibility both physically and vocally by Charles Aitkin). Kelly Hunter as Goneril and Katy Stephens as Regan create hideously dynamic and powerful monsters, while John Mackay, most unusually, manages to make Albany interesting. There are interesting directorial decisions, too, which create their moments of magic for those who know the text well, such as that when the Fool (originally magnifiently played by Kathryn Hunter and now ably presented by Sophie Russell) makes a clear decision not to follow Lear into the storm. Plenty of magic moments here.

But that’s not why I’m writing this. There is magic in the Swan Theatre these two weeks which lasts for an hour and a quarter and is not to be missed. It’s a production of The Tempest undertaken jointly by Little Angel Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company. David Fielder plays Prospero and six other people play nine characters, a range of puppets,  six musical instruments and sing. It’s advertised as appropriate for ages 7+, but there’s also plenty for adults and Shakespeare fans.

From the moment when seagulls indicate a ship at sea and when Prospero creates the storm with his magic staff, to the return of the seagulls as the characters leave to board the ship at the end, you are held spellbound and delighted. Ariel and Caliban are puppets with their puppet masters providing their voices.

There are some fine performances. Prospero makes clear a huge range of emotions and reactions. Anneika Rose is stunning – beautiful, innocent, physically and vocally most impressive and coherent – as Miranda.

I laughed with delight a couple of times at the songs. The kids in the audience (they were the majority and loved it) were shocked, horrified and delighted by Caliban and his antics. The adults were surprised that the text was not modernised and delighted by the amazingly slick character and costume changes.  Those who know stretches of the play by heart were surprised and delighted by the deft cutting and pasting of the text.  There are also some stunning textual interepretations, such as the ballgown costumes which entice Stephano and Trinculo turning magically into threatening dogs and the banquet platters housing not food but beasts. The plot was beautifully clear, the set, consisting of a ship’s hull/cave entrance/bower/chess room/seagull-perch, singers’ and players’ rostrum, a joy to look at.

I have not seen anything so delightful, skilful, slick and engaging for a long time.

If you’re coming to Stratford to see one of the big three, then stay the following morning and see The Tempest at 10:30. It’s a very short run; it’s on from tomorrow (Wednesday 15 March) until Saturday 26 March each day except Sundays at 10:30; today (Tuesday 15 March), Saturday 19 March, Tuesday 22 March, Thursday 24 March and Saturday 26 March at 1:30 and there’s one evening performance – Thursday 17 March at 7:30.

If you’re staying overnight stay that little bit longer to catch it next morning. If not, make a special jourrney. Â

If you can’t get to Stratford make sure you experience  it at Little Angel Theatre in London from 9 April to 15 May.

 And, of course, why not stay the night at Moss Cottage?

Peter Buckroyd