Jeffrey Sweet–Making the Scene

The production of The Merchant of Venice that opened recently at CSC was among the most dismaying evenings I’ve had in the theater in recent memory.

It’s particularly dismaying because the director, Igor Golyak, recently staged in the same space a play called Our Class from a script by Tadeusz Słobodzianek that I thought, though a little short on clarity, was one of the more exciting productions I’ve seen this season. Our Class was based on an incident in which former classmates from a pre-WWII Polish high school ended up murdering other former classmates. Other former classmates who were Jewish. The production was filled with provocative ideas and exciting imagery.

So now Golyak has engaged the same talented company to address that problematic Shakespeare play, The Merchant of Venice. It is a play that, particularly in post-Holocaust days, is difficult to produce because of its anti-Semitic portrait of Shylock, the Jewish money-lender who attempts to exact repayment for a defaulted loan to the title character, Antonio, by carving a pound of flesh out of Antonio’s chest. But I’m guessing you know this already.

Various strategies have been employed to address the problem. I remember David Suchet saying on a broadcast of Acting Shakespeare that Shakespeare includes another Jewish character, Tubal, who is palpably not a bad guy, so, Suchet reasons, Shakespeare is clearly suggesting that Shylock is not bad because he’s Jewish (Tubal is Jewish and he’s not bad, right?) but that he is, in fact, a bad Jew.

Both Al Pacino and Dustin Hoffman have taken on the part, and both made the case that Shylock doesn’t start off bad but is driven to his attempt on Antonio’s life out of a desire for revenge by the hideous behavior towards him by the non-Jews during the course of the play. And there’s a fair amount in the text to support the idea.

From what I’ve read, Shakespeare probably invented Shylock without actually having met any Jews. He had probably only encountered Jews as stock villains in plays like The Jew of Malta. What interests me is what it suggests about Shakespeare’s instincts as a writer. He evidently did some research, so there is some familiarity evidenced in the script of some of what being a Jew was about. But what is most striking to me is that, though he positions Shylock as a villain, Shakespeare is incapable of writing the character without attempting to write from inside Shylock’s perspective, the perspective of a man who believes he is justified in what he is doing. And so you get the extraordinary “Hath not a Jew eyes” speech which leads to a justification of revenge. (Maybe you remember in Ernst Lubitsch’s great film comedy, To Be Or Not To Be, a Jewish actor fantasizes about delivering the speech to Hitler. Lubitsch was Jewish.) Shakespeare did this with other villains. Remember Claudius’ anguished soliloquy in Hamlet. And Margaret is certainly one of the villains of the Henry VI cycle, but she is given extraordinary speeches that often court the audience’s sympathy.

I can’t figure out what Golyak intended by turning Merchant into a live TV broadcast hosted by Antonio including cues for the audience in the studio (us) to applaud. And I don’t know why, at one point, a large nose on legs (representing Shylock) roamed the stage. I’m guessing it was meant to be satiric, but how?

I don’t expect directors I admire to have nothing but successes. I like Jamie Lloyd’s work a lot, but didn’t think much of how he staged Lucy Prebble’s The Effect. In the same season that I admired Ivo Van Hove’s staging of Arthur Miller’s A View From the Bridge and was put off by his bizarre staging of Miller’s The Crucible. So I’m going just note that I count this a Golyak misfire and, given my admiration for Our Class, will look forward to his next project.