Profane propaganda
Peter Jenkins
B eh t (Royal Court) The Merchant of Venice (RSC, Warehouse) BY coincidence I caught up with John Barton's small-arena version of the Merchant, in which perforce he addresses the subject of anti-semitism, in the same week as a new play by the young American playwright Martin Sherman brought the inhumanities of Dachau to the stage of the Royal Court. What Hitler did to the Jews he did on a somewhat smaller scale to the queers; between a quarter and half-a-million are thought to have perished in the extermination camps. Max, the hero of Bent, is a drunken and promiscuous Berlin homosexual with sadistic tendencies. His family has some money and he has a carefree confidence in his own ability to get away with things; he has a talent for What he calls 'doing deals'. It could be the gay scene in London or New York — there are no clues of Berlin — until the Gestapo bursts in and cuts the throat of Wolf, a pretty little Aryan tart. Horrors Commence. There is torture on the train Which culminates in Max — still doing deals — finishing off his own lover, Rudy, a feckless, camp dancer. Arrived at Dachau Max masquerades as a Jew in order to escape the still greater atrocities reserved for queers. He wears the yellow star instead of the dreaded pink triangle. His life consists of sYstematic torture. He carries rocks from one side of the stage to the other in the hades of summer and the sub-zero winter Pausing every two hours, in accordance With the camp rules, to stand rigidly to attention for precisely three minutes. The entire second act of the play consists of this routine. He shares it — having done a deal with one of the guards — with Horst, Who wears his pink triangle like a man. This second — and better — part of the Play consists in their love affair which is Consummated physically although vicari°uslY during one of their attention breaks. In the end Horst is sadistically murdered by the guards. Max buries him, dons the dead man's pink triangle, and crucifies himself on the electric fence. Max comes out.
An actors' duet between Ian McKellen and Tom Bell in the highly-formalised econd part of the play gives a saving integrity and dignity to an evening which Otherwise comes dangerously close to enlisting the unspeakable horrors of 13,,achau in the propaganda services of "ay Lib. Even if the documentary back ground to the play is entirely authentic there is something profane about the linking of sexual freedom with the unthink able, unstageable and unactable horror of the century in which we live. Martin Sherman is perhaps right in wanting to use the immense power of the theatre to confront us with the truth from which we so successfully flee but he must be careful, not to permit alternative escapes into kinky or sensational hiding places.
The Merchant of Venice is one of the most opulent and sensuous of Shakes perian comedies and relies heavily upon the decadent ostentation of Venice and the dream-like paradise of Belmont. The first question to ask, therefore, is why Barton (whose adorable Love's Labour's Lost has now come down from Stratford to the Aldwych) has subjected it to the austere rigours of the Warehouse. The chief advantage of such bare-bones pro ductions is the scope they allow for great er emotional intensity and/or intellectual insight. This may be due in part to the sheer proximity of audience and actors (which can be immensely exciting with Shakespeare) and in part to the challenge presented by the absence of scenery or elaborate costume. With The Merchant of Venice, however, this seems almost as perverse as doing Robinson Crusoe on ice.
Theatrical experience is highly subjective and plays mean different things to different people. The more physically the audience is involved the more this may be so. Certainly in the case of this production, the reviewers, while for the most part enthusiastically praising it, have been wildly at variance in their readings of it. This, it seems to me, means that Barton has failed to achieve the clarity of meaning for which he is justly famous.
As I saw it, he had made the centre of the play its anti-semitism. From the moment Gratiano opens his mouth with 'Let me play the fool ... 'we know that this is no chinless buffoon but an aristocratic Jew-baiter. He is such a repulsive specimen that he invites us to see the Antonio set as a mob of upper-class delinquents, Antonio himself lacking in the noble quality which is the pivot of the plot and Bassanio, although always a cad, in this production lacking the looks or accomplishments to make him any kind of match for perfect Portia.
By the anachronism of Edwardian dress (a hint of the turning of the century of the holocaust?) our prejudice is excited against the orthodoxy of a Shylock infuriatingly dressed in the uniform of the central European ghetto. This is not a noble Shylock, the tragichero invented by Kean, but something nearer to the Shakesperian original and to the racial stereotype of our own age. We feel sorry for him because he is a miserable and miserly creature. He keeps his fag ends in a battered tin and a cigarette droops from his slovenly lip even as he sharpens his knife in the court room. He knocks about his daughter Jes: sica whose treachery is thus vindicated; he is shown up in the scene with Tubal as the kind of money lender who brings usury and jewry into disrepute; and when the judgement is given against him he cringes, grasps at the reprieve of half his fortune and accepts his Christian fate with resignation.
An ignoble Shylock, convincingly played by Patrick Stewart but almost as if a supporting character role, creates too many problems unless the rest of the play is kept firmly in Elizabethan perspective. Modernise and trouble abounds. The roles of Antonio and Bassanio are destroyed which is why, perhaps, I thought the performances of David Bradley and John Nettles so poor. Downgrade the men and the play, already tilted in favour of the women, becomes unbalanced. Lisa Harrow spoke Portia as beautifully as she looked the part and Diana Berriman and Avril Carson made Nerissa and Jessica into more than female accessories — indeed, Nerissa became far too classy to be betrothed to the loathsome Gratiano.
The casket scenes convince only if either Portia is thought to be manipulating the lottery or if her filial devotion to the wishes of her deceased father is credible. Neither is the case of she is turned into a kind to Zuleika Dobson. With Launcelot Gobbo done as Harpo Marx complete with motor horn and his old dad as a blind Glaswegian street entertainer (the former most unfunnily acted) this production lacked the coherence which is indispensible under the microscope of the small theatre-in-the-round.
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