The Merchant of Venice

Jan 25 2025 | By | Reply More

★★★★★     Unflinching

Lyceum: Sat 18 Jan – Sat 15 Feb 2025
Review by Rebecca Mahar

Completing the inaugural outing of The Shakespeare Exchange, a partnership of the Lyceum with New York City-based Theatre for a New Audience, TFANA brings Arin Arbus’s unflinching 2022 production of The Merchant of Venice to Edinburgh.

Set in “an American city in the near future”, director Arbus pulls Shakespeare’s 16th century Venice into the here and now; the what is, and the what might soon be.

Edinburgh may not be not the Brooklyn in which this production was originally staged; Lyceum audiences are unlikely to be as deeply ingrained with the fabric of American racism and bigotry, but it should not be difficult for anyone attending to empathise with Arbus’s concept, and translate its messages to their own context.

John Douglas Thompson as Shylock and Danaya Esperanza as Jessica, pictured in the 2022 performances. Pic: Gerry Goodstein.

The Merchant of Venice is a complicated play. Apart from its interweaving storylines, its genre defies classification: in its first quarto of 1600, the play is described as an “excellent history” and a “comical history”; in the catalogue of plays from 1623’s First Folio, it is sorted under Comedy.

But with a script packed full of undeniable racism, religious prejudice and cruelty, can a modern audience consider Merchant a comedy? Could Shakespeare’s audience? Do the play’s moments of laughter, perhaps, smooth the path for its audience to suddenly find themselves in a thicket of difficult, dangerous questions?

The play opens with the merchant of the title, Antonio (Alfredo Narciso), unaccountably sad, despite his good fortunes. His dear friend Bassanio (Ariel Shafir), meanwhile, finds himself in need of a loan. Antonio cannot immediately furnish Bassanio with the sum, but agrees to stand bond for him to take out a loan from Shylock (John Douglas Thompson), a Jewish moneylender who makes his living by the interest he charges; a practice abhorred by Antonio and the rest of the play’s Christian characters.

two marriages

Meanwhile, two marriages are in the works. Shylock’s daughter, Jessica (Danaya Esperanza), is in love with a young Christian called Lorenzo (Ðavid Lee Huỳnh), and has resolved to run away and convert in order to become his wife, financing their lifestyle with money and jewels stolen from her father.

Ðavid Lee Huỳnh as Lorenzo and Alfredo Narciso as Antonio, pictured in the 2022 performances.. Pic: Gerry Goodstein.

Elsewhere, rich noblewoman Portia (Isabel Arraiza), in love with Bassanio, is by the decree of her late father’s will forced to marry whoever selects one of three caskets (gold, silver, and lead) inside of which her portrait is hidden.

These two strands appear at first to be quite separate, but are on a collision course, as characters from Venice begin to make their way to Portia’s Belmont home. Once Bassanio has triumphantly chosen the correct casket and claimed Portia as his bride, he receives a letter from Antonio that all the merchant’s investments have failed, and his bond to Shylock is due: a pound of flesh cut from nearest the heart, in lieu of interest.

Jessica expresses the seriousness of her father’s intent to collect the bond, and Portia offers to pay any sum of money to save Antonio from it on Bassanio’s behalf. All the men then set out back to Venice, followed shortly by Portia and her lady in waiting Nerissa (Shirine Babb), disguised a young male lawyer and his clerk. There all gather in the courtroom, to decide Antonio’s fate— and ultimately, Shylock’s.

colour-conscious

The company are the definition, not of colour-blind, but rather of colour-conscious casting. Diversity runs through the whole company; not as a reductive Jews vs. Gentiles = Black vs. White, but as a spectrum of heritage and identity that represents a wide swath of the population of, for instance, the Brooklyn where this production was born, allowing difference, sameness, intersectionality, and representation to co-mingle.

Graham Winton as Salerio, Isabel Arraiza as Portia, Nate Miller as Jailer and Shirine Babb as Nerissa, pictured in the 2022 performances. Pic: Gerry Goodstein.

This casting highlights not only how one’s experiences are directly affected by one’s background (and the way they are perceived in and by the world), but also that prejudice has no one face.

John Douglas Thompson is incomparable as Shylock. One of only a few Black actors who have been afforded the opportunity to play this role, he deeply and deliberately imbues Shylock with the experience of a Black man in America, layering subtleties into an already complex role.

Shylock is wealthy and powerful, but also subject to insult and restriction because of his religion, not truly considered a member of Venetian society.

exceptional lengths

Thompson shows the exceptional lengths Shylock must go to as a Black man to exist in this society: he is impeccably tailored, relatively soft spoken, friendly and jocular to Antonio in the beginning, despite the merchant’s insults. He restrains his anger, deescalating physical aggression that comes towards him – navigating with care a society that explicitly hates and fears him, while still requiring his services.

John Douglas Thompson as Shylock, pictured in the 2022 performances. Pic: Henry Grossman.

The detail and clarity with which Thompson interprets and communicates Shylock is extraordinary. His intentions, and the how and why he ends up in the courtroom whetting his knife for Antonio’s flesh, are never in question. Without making any claim to Shylock’s moral perfection, this Merchant clearly shows his journey from content, prosperous businessman and doting father, to betrayed and righteous revenger against hypocrisy, and on: to a man broken, adrift, and utterly alone.

It is easy to play Lorenzo as a nice young man whose casual bigotry is simply a product of the world he lives in. Ðavid Lee Huỳnh’s Lorenzo does not take the easy road, rather showing definitively the potential in the text for Lorenzo’s deception and cruelty, and how someone who seems devoted and exceptional can hide their true self until a marriage is secured.

From the moment Lorenzo arrives at Shylock’s house to spirit Jessica away while wearing a pig mask, to his overt abuse and abandonment of her in the play’s final scene, Huỳnh masterfully executes his slide from romance to dreadful reality.

future uncertain

Similarly, Jessica’s potential is often overlooked, ending the play as happily as she began— or more so, married, converted, and with her future secure. Danaya Esperanza’s Jessica is far more subtle than this, charting a similar course to Shylock in her journey from happy, rebellious young woman in love, through the realisation of who her husband really is, to her final moments in which she, too, is utterly alone, with a future uncertain and frightening.

In her despair she turns to a Jewish prayer of forgiveness and, across the distance, finds her father again. Esperanza’s performance is achingly compelling, as each layer of Jessica’s naïveté and optimism is stripped away.

Shirine Babb as Nerissa and Isabel Arraiza as Portia, pictured in the 2022 performances. Pic: Gerry Goodstein.

As Portia, Isabel Arraiza delivers multifaceted excellence, embodying both Portia’s injustice created by the will of her dead father, and her prejudice and privilege. Her appearance as the lawyer in the courtroom scene is exceptional, showcasing Portia’s mercilessness once she has decided that Shylock is to be punished for claiming what the law promised him. And also subtle: in the extended silence of Shylock’s eventual exit, only Portia and Antonio appear to be at all reckoning with what they have done, for different reasons.

In casting a Black woman as Nerissa, this production does not play into the trope of relegating Black women to maid roles, but rather comments on it. Shirine Babb’s Nerissa is presented as a witty, precise, utterly competent executive assistant type.

baked-in bigotry

Friendly with Portia and holding a certain degree of household power, she is nevertheless forced to navigate her employer’s baked-in bigotry. Plenty of space is given to Babb’s eloquent nonverbal reactions to the play’s micro (and macro) aggressions, such as when Portia makes flippantly racist comments, or when her husband Gratiano (Haynes Thigpen) directs her specifically to make Jessica welcome.

ohn Douglas Thompson as Shylock, Alfredo Narciso as Antonio and company, pictured in the performances. Pic: Henry Grossman.

This Merchant explores the complex interplay of religion, race, colourism (lines such as “there is more difference between thy flesh and hers than between jet and ivory” about Jessica, directed at Shylock, particularly cutting in this context), classism, sexism, queerness, and more, with a dauntless commitment.

Every arc is fully mined for its potential: Lancelet Gobbo, the clown of the piece, is here played with depth by Matthew Saldívar. Despite his own casual anti-Semitic comments, he is devoted to Jessica, watching her downfall with protective concern, and ultimately helpless anger at his inability to protect her.

laced with meaning and impact

Every character is fully fleshed and fully human, every moment laced with meaning and impact, every word fully realised and intended.

Arin Arbus’s Merchant holds a mirror up to the bigotry inherent in contemporary America — in the world, in anywhere that prejudice abides, be it blatant or subtle — and refuses to look away. Never again, says this Merchant, while acknowledging that the promise of never again has already been broken, if it ever was fulfilled.

There is no catharsis here, that purification or purgation of the emotions raised by a drama, that allows its audience to depart the theatre having experienced tragedy in all its complexity, pity, and fear, but refreshed and renewed in their lives beyond their time spent with it.

This Merchant hurts; a pain that, if you’ve been paying any attention, will stay with you. As it should.

Running time: Two hours and 50 minutes (including one interval)
Royal Lyceum, 30b Grindlay Street EH3 9AX
Sat 18 January – Sat 15 February 2025
Tue – Sat: 7.30pm; Weds & Sat mats: 2.30pm.
Tickets and details: Book here.
Access performances: 29 Jan (audio described, touch tour), 30 Jan (captioned), 6 Feb (signed), 12 Feb (captioned), 15 Feb (audio described, touch tour).

The Shakespeare Exchange between the Lyceum and TFANA, saw Zinnie Harris’s Macbeth (an undoing) touring to New York City in 2024.

Alfredo Narciso as Antonio, pictured in the 2022 performances. Pic: Henry Grossman.

ENDS

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