The Merchant of Venice
Stratford Festival
The National Post

When Scott Wentworth's Shylock first comes up with his pound-of-flesh proposition, he's very cool and businesslike about it. Well, he is a businessman. There's an undercurrent of humour there too; he does call it a "merry bond" and this Shyock seems truly tickled at the idea of making so outlandish a deal. It's a note he sounds again, more emphatically, when in his next speech the Jew throws up his hands in pious horror at the Christians' idea that he would ever collect so meaningless a forfeit. But there's a third layer as well. "I hate him," Shylock has already said of Antonio; and the hatred, well earned by Antonio's behaviour to him, burns beneath everything he subsequently says or does. The rare merit of Wentworth's performance is that he can convey all these levels simultaneously.

His power and clarity are remarkable. This is an actor who can command the Stratford Festival stage with voice and stance, even when he has his back to us. He is not an especially sympathetic Shylock. Stern and narrow by temperament, he's a man rendered bitter by persecution; Antoni Cimolino's production, set in 1930s Fascist Italy, presents a society in which traditional marginalization is inching its way toward outright state sanctioned brutality. But he does appreciate the irony by which the merchant who has delighted in insulting and humiliating him now needs his financial assistance, and it seems for a time that the dark humour of this situation, which he spells out with relish, will be enough in itself to sustain him; he has, after all, no good reason to expect that Antonio will default on his debt. He enjoys the idea that Bassanio may waste the "borrowed purse" for which his friend Antonio stands surety, but that's a side dish; it isn't going to stop Antonio's ships from coming in.

What tips him, of course, is the elopement of his daughter Jessica with a Christian and a casket of ducats. (Good to be reminded that there are four caskets in this play, not three.) He comes home, in this staging, to find the mezuzah torn from his gates by the revellers who have abducted her. Not that there's been much noticeable warmth in the father-daughter relationship; the fondest gesture is the guilt-laden hug that Jessica (Sara Farb) bestows on Shylock just prior to robbing and deserting him.

By the time he reaches the trial, Wentworth's Shylock is twice obsessed: with revenge and with the law. The latter is as almost as important to him as the former; he's having his day in court (it may, in this production's context, be the last a Jew in Venice will ever have, and he knows it) and he hugs the legal rightness of his cause. You get the feeling that if Portia could find a valid weakness in his case, he would give in, though probably not gracefully; he scans the bond very carefully to see if it requires a surgeon to be present.

And indeed, when Portia does defeat him, on hair-splitting grounds, his incredulous response is, "Is that the law?" Assured that it is, he tries, like the practical man he is, to make the best of it. Only when his opponents further turn the screws on him - again legally - does he momentarily, savagely, threaten to break out: a stunning moment, and one I don't remember seeing before.

Thanks largely, but by no means entirely, to its Shylock, this trial scene is immensely exciting. Well, all right, it usually is. What's more surprising is that the big casket scene is almost equally suspenseful. This, too, has to do with context. The stage is thronged with Portia's household and Bassanio's followers, all of them desperate to see him make the right choice, and their involvement communicates itself to us. Just as remarkable is the last scene: that awkward mixture of squabbling and celebration, in which everyone tries to behave as if Shylock had never existed. There's a palpable chill in the Belmont air; Lorenzo's speech in praise of music is cued by his attempts to find a radio station that doesn't feature a frenzied oration by Hitler or Mussolini. The production does seem to suggest that there was no difference between the two, in terms of anti-Semitism; that wasn't the case, at least at that date, but it's a forgivable elision. No wonder Lorenzo, with a Jewish wife, is feeling uneasy; no wonder Michelle Giroux's highly intelligent Portia is perturbed and even somewhat guilty. She's begun the play, like a regency or restoration heroine, making fun of her unwelcome pan-European suitors and mocking their accents; she gives herself most gracefully to Bassanio; and she discovers herself, both her talents and their consequences, in her male-lawyer disguise.

This is a fluent, thoughtful production, crammed with local colour, with Douglas Paraschuk's gated set providing easy access from Venice to Belmont and back. (Full disclosure: my son is the assistant director.) There are some weak performances, but the key ones are strong, beginning with Tom McCamus' Antonio, flaunting a homoerotic melancholy, he never shakes off; he seems, at some level, to want to be sacrificed. Tyrell Crews thinks his way through a feckless Bassanio with unexpected philosophical depths; Tyrone Savage is a lyrical, trenchant Lorenzo; and Jonathan Goad's Gratiano plays the fool with a self-conscious exaggeration that suggests, accurately, in terms of his later loutish behaviour, that he has something to hide; it's a shame that the curtailing of his one melancholy speech denies him the chance to round the portrait off.

Some what similarly, Antoine Yared is a very funny Prince of Arragon, bearing himself like a cross between Salvador Dali and a matador, but he flunks his final moment of self-realization. Sophia Walker's Nerissa is her best performance at Stratford but the production makes surprisingly little, in such a race-conscious play, of Portia's having a black maid.

I have a suspicion that the best play of both highlighting and reconciling this play's contradictions might be to give it an unromanticized 16th century setting. This production is thoroughly compelling on its own terms; coming one night after Othello, that other racial Venetian play, it constitutes a grand slam that might be a landmark for Stratford. Indeed that's not all; this season has given us four Shakespeare productions, all different, all good. I can't remember the last time that happened.