By Dominic Cavendish for the Telegraph, 1 May 2015
‘I’d love it if they booed me,’ Jonathan Pryce said recently, when asked how he’d feel if the Globe audience treated his Shylock as a contemptible villain, as happened to a disconcerting degree in the first revival of The Merchant of Venice at the venue in 1998. It caused some critics to worry that the spirit of panto-land had invaded the newly reconstructed theatre.
I can’t see that occurring with Jonathan Munby’s oak-solid, finely weighted production. The director makes Italy’s mercantile paradise a place of unpardonably vicious anti-Semitism. A mood-setting masque shifts from capering frolics into an ugly assault on two Jews wandering past. Pryce’s money-lender, in turn, is variously spat on, tugged by the beard (by his jeering debtor Antonio) and roughly manhandled. His second-class status is implicit.
0
0
0
0
Comments