This article first appeared in THE WEEKENDER

19th January 2008

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It’s a risky business, making plays at Maynardville. Apart from the nightly gamble with the rain, each production faces the challenges attendant on open-air theatre: a gust of wind in a microphone or a police siren in the middle distance breaking the passion or tension of a dramatic moment; the difficulty of creating intimacy and sustaining energy as these dissipate into the trees and the night sky, compounded when performing Shakespeare by the occasional need for over-acting to explain the dense Elizabethan repartee or to make the comedy funny. Still, the permanent stage and seating area that have been constructed in the park provide a rich setting in which, year by year, the actors brave the elements to provide Cape Town’s denizens and summer visitors with a quality production. When it works, the rewards are great.

Risk and reward are the occupational parameters of Antonio, the wealthy title character in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice. His good friend, Bassanio, has plans to woo and wed a young heiress, Portia, but needs cash to do so; Antonio wants to give him the money, but cannot, because all his capital is at sea, heading to the various corners of the globe. Still, his credit rating being higher than the debt-laden Bassanio, Antonio is able to borrow the necessary funds from Shylock, a Jewish usurer or money-lender. He does it reluctantly because – like all his fellow Venetian ‘Christians’ – he is an anti-Semitic bigot (and he rebukes the interest that Shylock charges even though, probably excluded from other forms of business, it is his only means of income). But the needs of his friend are such that he puts his ‘principals’ aside.

In this production, director Roy Sargeant interprets the relationship between Antonio (Graham Weir) and Bassanio (Clayton Boyd) as a homosexual one. This is a viable reading and one that, considering their dialogue, makes more sense to a twenty-first century audience – we are unused to hearing the repeated expressions of tenderness and affection that were common enough in Platonic male friendships of early modern Europe but that don’t sit well with post-Victorian machismo.

Nevertheless, although Sargeant goes to some lengths to defend his choice in the programme notes, the Bassanio-as-bisexual line (he does, after all, gladly shack up with Portia) doesn’t work consistently in this production. Apart from a farewell that turns into a lingering kiss, Weir’s Antonio and Boyd’s Bassanio don’t make a convincing couple; and while, in a moment towards the end of the play, the love triangle is exploited for its comic potential, one would really expect Portia to be more than a little peeved if she has observed the excessive attachment of Antonio to her new husband.

The homo-/heterosexual blurring is given an additional resonance by the gender confusion inherent in the playtext – Portia dressing as a man to intervene on Antonio’s behalf at his trial when, all his ventures having failed, he has to forfeit on the loan – but, on the whole, a potentially central directorial choice seems peripheral at times.

The same could be said of the other major decision made by Sargeant: to set the play during World War Two. This has been done often enough before (indeed, Janice Honeyman did it at Maynardville fifteen years ago) and it could be argued that every sensitive production of The Merchant of Venice since 1945 has been inflected by an awareness of the Holocaust as the apex of an anti-Semitic tradition in Europe: one in which the play was mostly complicit for the first three centuries of its existence. And, apart from Shylock’s eloquent speeches condemning the Christians for their hypocrisy – the heart of the play in modern productions – the bulk of the action lies with the interests and affairs of the other characters.

In this production, the soldiers’ uniforms, along with various parodies of Hitler, remind us of the war context but Nazism does not dominate the narrative until the final scene: Sargeant has added a coda, a kind of dumb-show indicating the invasion of Italy by Germany. This produces a brief but profound moment in which Shylock, who has been ordered to convert to Christianity, is forced instead to put on a coat with the yellow Star of David – and is, presumably, soon to be sent to the concentration camps. One is unable to tell if Jeremy Crutchley’s Shylock is glad to be identified as a Jew (it was an identity he was about to have stripped from him) or simply struck dumb by the tragic irony of it all.

Here and throughout, Crutchley gives a simply masterful performance. His Shylock is a savvy businessman and a pious Jew, but the bitter playfulness with which he interacts with his fellow Venetians at the start of the play indicates a deep well of frustration. This overflows when his daughter, Jessica, steals some of his most precious jewels to elope with the soldier Lorenzo, making Shylock vindictive and malicious in seeking out a pound of Antonio’s flesh according to the terms of their agreement. Defeated in the courtroom, Shylock disappears from the text, but Crutchley’s silent departure from the stage was so well executed that it was given a (highly unusual) round of applause mid-scene.

It may be added here that the opening night audience was not always so finely attuned: in the tense moment before Shylock approaches Antonio with a knife to cut out his flesh, no-one found it funny when Weir began reciting the Lord’s Prayer, but Crutchley’s Hebrew incantations elicited laughter; likewise, the pathos-heavy sentence that Shylock “become a Christian” brought a few titters. Perhaps we have not learned from history quite so well as we think. 

Of course, the problem with post-Holocaust treatments of the play is that if, in Shylock’s desperate plea for his “bond”, we hear not just the comic machinations of a stock character but the cry of all victims of injustice for recognition – and we must hear it in this way – then almost all the other characters in the play become rather unlikeable in their treatment of him.

The cast’s portrayal of the ‘Brat Pack’ of soldiers is thus appropriately ambiguous; they are not particularly nice people, both in their prejudices and in the hard edge to their behaviour that fighting a war brings. Likewise, Tessa Jubber’s Portia is more ‘rich bitch’ than ‘bright young thing’, even though we may be sympathetic to her predicament – her father has left her a large estate, but his will confines her ‘choice’ of husband to an obscure lottery. Yet even this Portia is able to become a kind of proto-feminist heroine when she wows the courtroom as a “learned doctor”. Indeed, the production as a whole is stronger in the second half that begins with this long and demanding scene.

Portia and her girly sidekick Nerissa (Juliet Jenkin) also find time to show up the inconstancy of their new husbands, Bassanio and the raffish Graziano (Scott Sparrow) and to have some fun at their expense. As Sargeant points out, the humour in this ‘comedy’ has “a sour taste”, but there is enough of it in this production. Darron Araujo perhaps deserves particular mention for his entertaining rendition of the clownish servant Lancelot Gobbo.