The Merchant of Nowhere

Two effeminate young men in dresses prance onto the stage. When the laughter and cheering stop one of them agreeably lisps to the other, “By my troth, Nerissa, my little body is aweary of this great world.” When King James saw The Merchant of Venice in 1605 this is probably what Portia looked and sounded like. In Shakespeare’s all-male theatre actors in drag could be serious representations of women—or men in dresses funny.The Merchant was a comedy, with Shylock as a comic villain (see Quadrant, March 2017) and Portia and her maid Nerissa comic heroines. Imagine a young seventeenth-century Frankie Howerd as Portia and her words, when she speaks of Bassanio, are not quite what we are used to: “He of all men that ever my foolish eyes looked upon was the best deserving of a fair lady.”

Approaching the trial scene, Shakespeare prompted his boy actors for their roles. The young men playing girls pretending to be men would need to speak “between the age of man and boy / With a reed voice, and turn two mincing steps / Into a manly stride”. Yet for hundreds of years vain Portias have ignored their creator’s directions and stepped into fetching judicial attire before destroying Shylock with their poetry and law.

Those original performers came on stage for the trial scene with their exaggerated manly stride, their little bodies cloaked in over-large borrowed legal gowns. When Portia asks the villain, “Is your name Shylock?” there seems to be, even in modern non-comic productions, an unexplained joke. The humour may be that when Portia first looked on Shylock she was staring out of thick, heavy-framed spectacles. The reason that Bassanio and Gratiano do not recognise their wives in Doctor Balthazar and his clerk may be that Portia and Nerissa were meant to be performed in commedia dell’arte costumes, masks and disfiguring glasses. Beneath their legal gowns the audiences may have been given glimpses of overstuffed codpieces.

The great speech, “The quality of mercy is not strained, / It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven / Upon the place beneath”, may have been humour with Doctor Balthazar suggesting to the audience that even without straining something far different from rain was about to droppeth on the villainous Jew.

Antonio’s supposed sexual hankering for Bassanio is excitedly explored in modern productions. In an all-male cast, as in Shakespeare’s theatre, there is an even stronger element of hetero-homo comedy between the male role players and the boys playing the women. Though here not all the female characters are treated equally. Portia and Nerissa are comic but Jessica, Shylock’s daughter, is handled respectfully. All three will appear in male attire—Portia and Nerissa for comedy, but when Jessica dons trousers Lorenzo acknowledges the transformation “even in the lovely garnish of a boy”. Shakespeare released the player from his drag role and restored his masculinity, as if giving him, midway through the play, a chance for his performance as a male actor to be acknowledged by the audience. This week he is Jessica but next week, who knows, he may be Romeo.

The play’s ending, the happy ring scene when all is revealed to the surprised husbands, is particularly bawdy. The word ring, generally supposed to allude to female genitalia, is repeated over twenty times. In an all-male production the word refers to a different part of the anatomy of the men in dresses and is crude hetero-homo humour. The profoundly anti-Semitic play ends not with what may seem a rather tame conclusion by Gratiano but with a final boisterous vulgar leer: “Well, while I live I’ll fear no other thing / So sore as keeping safe Nerissa’s ring.”

At the Theatre Royal in Hobart the Bell Shakespeare (BS) touring production of The Merchant of Venice was nothing like that: it was a typical BS production of mutilated Shakespeare. The subsidised company is Australia’s leading Shakespearean theatre group. This is where most Australians will see Shakespeare on stage. Its mistreatment of the texts is cultural vandalism.

This Merchant, directed by Anne-Louise Sarks, is not Shakespeare’s play. Scenes are cut, misplaced, created. Laughter comes from added bits, funny faces, exaggerated diction, physical business, new words. The second-rate has been grafted on to Shakespeare and it is this that entertains the audience.

When Portia reveals her plan to dress as a man, the incident has been cut adrift from its author’s construction and moved to just before the trial scene. She says to Nerissa that they will appear “in such a habit / That they shall think we are accomplished / With that we lack.” Nerissa screams out, “Dicks!” The Australian praised the production as “an intelligent close reading of the play”.

The story itself is changed. Mitchell Butel, who performs a heroic un-villainous Shylock, said, “It is one of the greatest stories ever written, so you can’t go wrong.” The director has gone wrong and the new play is a contemporary, dull-witted collection of feminist and fashionable audience-pleasing prejudices with a new sentimentalised ending.

At the back of the stage is a simple silver backdrop. Before it to the side is a single green tree. Low benches are arranged in a semicircle facing the audience. The actors sit here when they are not performing. Golden leaves fall from the flies, without reason. After interval, they float down again but this time coloured brown. On the far sides of the stage are standing clothes racks for costumes where the actors change. Towards the back, mounted on a tall wheeled table, are the famous boxes for Portia’s suitors to choose. The stage setting is pleasant, attractive and blandly meaningless.

Director Sarks asks, “How can you make a play from the sixteenth century, that was speaking to a very different climate, speak to 2017?” Simple: let the actors speak the lines that Shakespeare wrote. Let them put together the words, keep them from running into each other and walking into the set, and leave the audience alone. Then accept the consequences for staging an anti-Semitic play.

The actors enter, in modern dress. They stand about, Christians here, wearing small gold crosses, and the Jews, Shylock and Jessica, isolated over there. It begins. The cross-wearers fall to their knees and say the Lord’s Prayer.

Modern anti-Semitism does not live in the Vatican. It’s not because of the local curé that Jews are streaming out of France for safety. This anti-Catholic prejudice excuses real anti-Semites in the audience—the BDS supporters and the Left apologists and allies of Islamic fundamentalism and Jew hatred. The failure to acknowledge what is happening in Australia as in Europe is an intellectual cop-out that also insults Christians in the Middle East and South-East Asia who are being murdered by Islamists.

At the front of the stage is a sign with electric letters, “The Comical Historie of The Merchant of Venice”. Pre-play publicity advertised an “uncompromising and dark production”. Antonio (Jo Turner) seemed terribly depressed when he stopped praying and seemed about to cry when he spoke: “In sooth I know not why I am so sad.”

After a bit, the depressed man kisses Bassanio (Damien Strouthos). The Australian [Left] Book Review was impressed: “This [the homosexuality] is no kowtowing to modern sensibilities; on the contrary, the homoeroticism works so well within the drama of the play that one wonders at not having seen it before.”

The gay interpretation of Antonio’s love for Bassanio has been on stage and film since the 1980s. Absolutely de rigueur in modern performances, this time around it’s closer to rigor mortis, for with the kiss there comes a sudden underlining freezing of action and horse-frightening music from above. I’m not making this up. It is very Menzies-era.

Gay kiss number two occurred as Shylock prepared to cut into his victim. Antonio turned to Bassanio and placed a sloppy kiss on his friend’s lips. Poor Bassanio reacted as though an asp had bitten him. No organ music, no wedding bells here.

The homo attraction theme itself is based on only a few lines that could represent idealised male friendship in Shakespeare’s time. Directors who play the gay scenario ignore an equally warm-hearted line from Gratiano (Fayssal Bazzi): “I tell thee what, Antonio—I love thee and it is my love that speaks.” Perhaps it’s one of those open gay relationships Fairfax Media will tell us about after the same-sex plebiscite is concluded.

When Antonio approached the moneylender for the first time he cried out what sounded like “Shyyyylooock”. Even Shylock seemed to find it odd. What strange thoughts get into directors’ heads.

The comic scene with Old Gobbo is cut, possibly because Shakespearean verbal comedy eludes the company. Launcelot (Jacob Warner), the clown, gets laughs from additions to the text. When entrusted with letters to deliver he produces a notebook and needs assistance spelling out the names of recipients. This went down very well with the audience and was repeated.

Portia and Nerissa (Catherine Davies) are flighty young feminists from other BS comedies. Their lines are added to and care has been taken to give them extra business. A male play butchered to make a feminist play is not a pretty thing.

Poor Morocco (Shiv Palekar)—his intelligent and sensitive speech on racism is perverted by imposed feminist silliness. The lines, “And let us make incision for your love / To prove whose blood is reddest, his or mine”, is accompanied by an exaggerated pantomime of cutting his own arm. Not only is it poor stuff, it is a waste of a young actor who later, doubling in the role of Lorenzo, gives a romantic and elegant reading of “The moon shines bright”. However, when Morocco picks the wrong box he saves Portia from a life under a burka. This tone-deaf production then allows an offensive racist comment by Portia to pass as humour: “A gentle riddance! Draw the curtains, go. / Let all of his complexion choose me so.”

The Prince of Aragon (Eugene Gilfedder) is effete and drunk. And Antonio, holding an empty bottle, is drunk when he tries to reason with Shylock. Perhaps alcohol abuse is a generational wowserish thing on the part of the director.

The villain in the play seems to be Antonio. When Shylock collapses at the loss of his daughter, not his ducats, the merchant who is in debt to him seizes the opportunity to spit on the floored Jew.

Mitchell Butel’s Shylock was muted. Neither he nor Jessica Tovey (Portia) gave memorable performances because they were no longer Shakespeare’s characters but were owned by the director. Shakespeare’s Shylock is a great figure in our theatrical traditions. He is never entirely clear, neither completely black nor white; there is room for an actor to create within the tradition. This Shylock had been pre-packaged for victimhood, constrained to suffer from Christian hatred and the loss of his daughter. Butel occupied the dark suit and wore a prayer shawl, quietly. Having the players always on stage meant that from time to time one noticed the actor sitting still on the bench, a hat on his head and a small bag at his side. It was a striking image. He seemed in his stillness like a sad figure from the Holocaust, a lonely Jew awaiting deportation.

Shakespeare’s Shylock is big and brutal, Butel’s is small. The part isn’t large. Seeing Shylock at the side of the stage throughout the performance reduces his impact. A villain Shylock who enters and exits the stage grows larger in our imaginations by his absences. A victim Shylock we see all the time remains little.

In this production the strongest part of the Shylock performance was an invented moment when he is attacked by the Christians and “converted”—though, despite some added church music, none of them actually seem very clear about how this is done. A limited interpretation of Shylock as only ever a victim was confining.

Jessica Tovey occupied Portia and her dress, with liveliness, but did little to illuminate the role. Even before Bassanio has selected the winning box and made her his wife she kisses him roguishly. Later, in well-cut male legal attire as Balthazar, she is more staid. The “quality of mercy” speech was pedestrian because with Shylock as the victim Portia was no longer making an impassioned appeal to a villain.

Nerissa competed with her mistress with enthusiasm and vulgarity and was spoiled with extra lines and busyness to build her part.

Having given the play a new beginning and messed up the middle bit, the director added a new ending. The play Shakespeare built was renovated with poor taste, chipboard walls and false ceilings. The feminist makeover was based on words written for boy actors, not twenty-first-century gender warriors.

To get to the newly invented ending the ring scene was scampered through, and little if any of Shakespeare’s bawdiness emerged. There was a rush to arrive at the point where a letter is read with Shylock’s promise to Lorenzo and Jessica of “a special deed of gift / after his death of all he dies possessed of”.

The Christians celebrate this joyful ending and one cruelly places the kippah that had been torn from Shylock’s head during his conversion on his daughter’s head. Jessica, who had robbed her father, breaks down and cries out, “I am ashamed.” Her husband, Lorenzo, drops beside her and tears into pieces the letter that has brought the good news. In Shakespeare’s text he had called it “manna in the way of starved people”.

None of the new ending comes from Shakespeare’s text. Jessica and Lorenzo are performing newly invented words and business. The fabricated ending is television-drama deep.

The applause was loud, long and sincere. Well before we took to tumbling statues we destroyed monuments of our literary heritage. There was some stamping of feet in approval. Civilisations end years before the bloody finis sign descends.

To Sarks’s question, “How can you make a play from the sixteenth century, that was speaking to a very different climate, speak to 2017?” there is another answer. Don’t. Instead, write a brand new play. Arnold Wesker did with his Shylock. Shakespeare’s play is sixteenth-century Jew-hating. Maybe write The Merchant of Lakemba to explore modern anti-Semitism with Mohamed (Antonio) and his friends as a Middle Eastern drug gang, and Jewish Shylock as the shylock—an eastern suburbs loan shark.