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Socialist Review Index (1993–1996) | Socialist Review 174 Contents
From Socialist Review, No. 174, April 1994.
Copyright © Socialist Review.
Copied with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
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David Thacker is a director with the Royal Shakespeare Company. His production of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice at the Barbican Theatre is a modern dress production set in the city of London. Patrick Connellan asked him what problems this presented. |
Some would say that The Merchant of Venice is a difficult play to perform. Shylock suffers discrimination and seeks justice through revenge. Can you make that revenge an anti-racist statement?
Normally when I direct plays by Shakespeare I have the same attitude as I do when I direct any great playwright. That is, I have an obligation to express the play, trust the play as written and attempt to give it life on stage. I would try not to alter or distort the playwright’s central intentions. With The Merchant of Venice this is not the case. If Shakespeare were aware of the oppression of Jews this century and the Holocaust I feel strongly that he would not allow the play to be performed in its present form. As he is not alive we should either not perform the play or we should make changes that would turn it into a play that Shakespeare might have allowed to be performed.
It has been necessary to cut quite a lot and shift the emphasis of
some of the material. I think the play is unconsciously anti-Semitic.
Only by making adjustments can the play be revealed as an analysis of
the causes of racism and not a racist play.
I felt that this Shylock deserved a pound of Antonio’s flesh partly because of David Calder’s brilliant performance but also because of a strong sense of the ruthlessness of the state. Was it your intention that we should sympathise with Shylock to the point of murder?
I would like the audience to draw the line at murder but to be emotionally carried along with him and to be intellectually convinced of his case. We are trying to chart a society that has no interest in integrating with him. He wants to coexist. He wants to hang onto his culture and religion. He wants to be proud as a Jew and to trade on an equal footing. They will not allow him to trade freely and subject him to appalling racism.
He is hurt most acutely when his daughter is taken out of his cultural protection into what he sees as an alienating, threatening and forbidding one – which, in this production, is a Christian yuppie culture of the 1980s. There is drinking, drug taking and parties of a kind that Shylock would find unacceptable and frightening. That is the trigger for his desire for revenge.
The action he then takes needs to be challenged. At the trial we have set up a powerful opposition between his determination and a genuine appeal for mercy from Portia. She can only frame it within the limitations of her own class and religious perspectives – nevertheless it is an impressive appeal. Once Portia has invoked the law, the Christians seize the opportunity and take the appalling step of insisting he should become a Christian.
It was a great surprise to me that none of the reviews seemed to
spot that if you set the play in the late 1980s it is post-Holocaust
society and Shylock exists as a post-Holocaust Jew. So coexisting you
have the discrimination of Shakespeare’s society and the memory of
the gas chambers. Within this context Shylock is driven into an
absolutist position. The modern parallel is the Zionist Jew who,
threatened with aggression, is locked into the attitude of ‘We are
going to get you before you get us.’ Shylock becomes a metaphor for
the state of Israel at its least forgiving and most dangerous.
It seems that Shakespeare vacillates between feudalism represented by Portia’s background and the Venetian merchants. The two worlds combine forces in the court scene.
Shakespeare is a product of his own time. He changes his attitude throughout his life towards divine right, free will or determinism. There is an attempt at harmony at the end of the play although what has been done to Shylock casts a shadow over the last act. Despite that shadow Shakespeare attempts to bring about a sort of purification and harmony. This is illustrated by Lorenzo:
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‘Such harmony is in immortal souls, |
Shakespeare always asserts the possibility of human beings
overcoming the things that separate and divide us.
He also shows how these questions are not so clear cut. Jessica has to betray her culture and her father to find some liberation.
Yes, he never finds a complete solution. The contradictions are always present. There are ways we treated Shylock to strengthen his case. We showed him as an intelligent, witty and cultured man as well as being a loving father. These human details make him a three dimensional character. Nevertheless, it has been necessary to cut some of his lines such as:
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‘If I can catch him once upon the hip, |
We had to get rid of the notion that Shylock was planning revenge
from the beginning.
Wasn’t Shylock simply trapped by circumstances? Elizabethan law decreed that the only people allowed to perform the lowly task of money lending were Jews so his grudge is not personal.
Yes, I agree. The people most in my head when I was directing the play were Jewish friends. The greatest test will be when Arthur Miller sees the production. I would be appalled to think that he might find Shylock portrayed in a way that was unacceptable or distasteful. With increasing racist assaults and Nazi activity throughout Europe, we have an obligation. There is a real responsibility to not only avoid any possibility of fuelling that racism but moreover to confront and reveal the source of that racist upsurge. I think that racism is inseparably linked to economic conditions. I hope that this play will reveal that to people in a way that might surprise them.
Opens 8 April Barbican Theatre.
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